Dissolve
by Summoner Luna
Summary: They thought in time their passion would fade to routine, but it has only become an addiction. While absence leads to weakness, their time together grows into a power they might not be able to control. [SquallxRinoa, post-game. Even if you become the world's enemy...]
1. Chapter 1

Rinoa was sitting at a table outside a coffee shop in downtown Timber when Selphie showed up to tell her she was leaving for Trabia. It was a mild day in early spring, and she and Squall had started their morning with a fight. Not a bad one, but one that ended with a strained goodbye before he left for Deling City, and Rinoa had spent the better part of the morning sulking around the house before deciding to grab Angelo's leash and head out to enjoy the weather. Fight or not, she missed him, as she always did when he left, and perhaps even more so when they said their goodbyes on bad terms. Staying at home would only give her more time to think about the argument, and how all she wanted to do was call him and apologize, and then yell at him for making her be the one to apologize, and the more she thought about that, the more she would be angry at Garden.

And anger at Garden never got her anywhere.

So, she walked. Down streets textured in shade from the trees that had survived the war, past the old cathedral one of the resistance groups used to use as a base. There was nowhere in Timber that didn't have a story from the last twenty years, and Rinoa remembered most of them, whether she was around for it or not. Leaving Balamb and coming back to Timber was supposed to be finally picking up the life she had placed on pause, but in so many ways, Rinoa wondered if she wasn't just stuck in a haze of nostalgia. When Squall was home, when they went out together, she could see the changes they had achieved. With him, Timber was alive. With him, she saw the future.

When he was gone, though…

She finally stopped in front of a cafe she didn't realize had re-opened, drawn in by the rich smell of pastries and freshly brewed coffee. She ordered a scone and a large drip, served to her in a thick mug with a chip on the handle and splashes of color in uneven shapes painted on the ceramic. She took a few moments to talk to the barista about how long they had been back in business, the growing economy, and the pleasant break from the recent cold weather, before another customer walked in, and Rinoa took a seat at one of the tables outside, and snuck a small piece of scone to Anglo, content to rest against her feet. She pulled out a book, and took in her surroundings while she waited for her coffee to cool. mid-morning, the streets were quiet. Joggers ran past her, and across the cobblestone street, one lane still closed from the repairs that never seemed to end, a young child broke into a grin and ran towards the central fountain, leaving his mother to call after him, resignation heavy in her shoulders.

It was a good morning for Timber, even if it wasn't a good morning for her-and that alone was worth something. Sitting at a cafe table under a bright sky-the only sounds around her birdsong and the steady beeping of construction equipment a few blocks away-was a hard-won peace, and even without anyone to share it with, Rinoa paused and closed her eyes, grateful for the simplicity of the moment.

Angelo stirred and heard footsteps approaching, and before she could will herself to open her eyes, someone dropped into the chair across from her, and a small amount of coffee splashed out of her mug and through the gaps in the wrought-iron table onto the toe of her shoe. She jerked back and turned, about to tell off whomever had ignored the other tables to interrupt her moment of silence, but her irritation turned quickly to concern.

"Selphie-?"

"It took me forever to find y-oh my goodness I'm so sorry! Rin, are those new shoes? They're so cute! At least they'll wipe clean, but I really am sorry, but Rinoa, I'm just so glad that I found you!"

"Well, hi to you too," Rinoa smiled, surprised and exhausted by the greeting, but pleased with unexpected company. She knelt down and wiped a napkin over the toe of her shoe. She wanted to tell Selphie that no, they weren't new, they just hadn't seen each other since she finally brought the last of the things she wanted from Caraway's to Timber, but thought better of it. There was a hitch in her friend's voice, on top of her very presence in Timber when Rinoa was certain Squall had said she was tied up in Balamb, and regardless, the subject of footwear-of her life in Timber, period-was not the easy topic it once had been.

"Oh-hi! What brings you out here? Are you okay? You look like you're really thinking about something. This place has to be two miles from your house, you didn't walk here, did you? It's cute though. Look inside-where's all the artwork from?"

"I'm fine," Rinoa said, and thought it wasn't completely a lie. "Just thinking about Timber. And I'm not sure. I haven't been here in years. I didn't even know they were open again until today." Her words felt slow against the vibrancy that followed Selphie everywhere she went, despite her attempts to infuse them with her normal cheer.

"You'd never know it from the outside, they look great. Anyway, I'm leaving for Trabia in the morning, and I was wondering if I could crash with you guys tonight? Sorry, I know I should have called but it was…" Selphie paused, and Rinoa bit back a frown.

"You're leaving for Trabia tomorrow?" she asked. "That's…"

"Sudden?"

Rinoa nodded.

"A lot of things were sudden," she said, and Rinoa reached for her coffee. She thought about offering to buy one for Selphie, even if caffeine appeared, as usual, to be the last thing she needed, but before she could ask, Selphie pulled out a pack of gum. She popped a piece into her mouth as thoughtfully, Rinoa decided, as it was possible to chew gum, and when she knelt down to put it back in her handbag, Rinoa saw the large green sea bag tucked behind Selphie's chair.

"Selphie…"

"So, tonight? Because if you guys have plans I can get a hotel. Garden would cover it anyway, but we haven't seen each other in so long, and well… I miss you. And…we have a lot to talk about."

Rinoa thought back to her fight with Squall, and the empty house she would be going back to. She could never decide when it was harder being away from him. When they were angry, she replayed their fight against the nagging concern that the last conversation they would ever have would be harsh words and raised voices. She still ached for him, but with a need to see him, to know she would have another chance to tell him that she loved him and feel his arms around her- to know that, if the worst happened, her last memories of him would be memories she could live with, could share.

The ache when they weren't angry though…

Rinoa took another sip of coffee and watched Selphie over the rim of her mug. Selphie was energy, or Sephie was Energy, and in this moment Rinoa could not entirely pinpoint which one she was seeing. She was frenetic, which was not uncommon, but in a way that made Rinoa want to reach across the table and embrace her, and tell her everything was going to be okay-even though she had no idea what Everything might be.

"Squall isn't back until Thursday," she finally said. "And I would love the company. The house is too quiet when he isn't here."

Selphie laughed, as Rinoa hoped she would.

"One day, I'll pass through town and manage to catch him," she said. "And then the next time you call me because you so desperately need someone to talk to and he's sleeping in a tree, or meeting someone in a five star hotel, or whatever it is he does when he's not at home, I will be the second person on the planet to have witnessed the rampant loquacity of Squall Leonhart. Granted, I'll owe Zell forty gil, but at least I won't think you're crazy."

"Not for that at least." Rinoa winked, and set her mug down on the table. "I'm pretty sure you could access his schedule and make that happen. Or at least give me a call."

"I know, Rin." Selphie waved her hand dismissively and stood up, and Rinoa did the same, with only a small glance towards her unfinished coffee. "It's not that I don't want to see you or don't want to talk to you. But you know what it's like."

She did. And she said so.

"Things are…different. So different since you two left."

"It's been-"

"I know, I know. It's been long enough, but…it's time, Rin. I miss Trabia. I know it's stupid to expect that going back there is going to change anything because _there_ is still barely a place, but it's…it's my not-place. Balamb… Balamb never was. You should understand that better than anyone."

Rinoa gestured east, towards the path she had followed less than an hour ago. "I still don't like going back there you know," she said, and watched Selphie shoulder the massive bag before they set off. "To Balamb. Not even to the graduation balls."

"I wouldn't either. Won't, that is. Wow!" Selphie pointed to the cathedral as they passed it. "I don't remember that from before! Jeez, it's only been a few months since I've been out here, how can so much have changed?"

Rinoa did not correct her, to tell her it had been over a year. Nor did she point out that the cathedral had always been here, even back in the war. She wanted to-it was fun having Selphie around, and Rinoa and Zell had long ago made a game out of watching her enthusiasm, and watching her react when she was reminded of having had the same enthusiasm over the same thing at some point in the past. She wanted to tell her how happy she was to see _someone_ , and how lonely it really could get here in Timber when Squall was gone. That when he left it was like he took part of her with him, and how she supposed he really did, but it scared her sometimes, and company was a good distraction.

She wanted to. But something else caught her eye.

"Your ring. You flipped the direction the heart is pointing."

Selphie paused, a stutter in her step before she regained her pace, and it confirmed for Rinoa what she saw, what that hitch in her voice had been the second Selphie had first addressed her.

"Selphie- He-"

Selphie nodded. "Rin, I think he meant it this time. He used to keep a few things in my dorm, and he just…took them away. And what was I supposed to say? He broke the agreement. So I said I was going to Trabia."

Rinoa reached for her friend's hand and gave it squeeze.

"That's a long way to go, you know. Don't you think you should stay, just to talk it out?"

"There's nothing to talk about-ooh, a wine store-can we stop here? We can stay up tonight and talk about how stupid they are. I'm sure Squall's done some pretty dumb things in the last year, I want to hear all of them."

Selphie led them into the store, and by accident or design, they lost the conversation in the hushed wooden racks of bottles imported from across Galbadia and the world, and by the time they walked out, they were caught in up dinner plans and jokes about waking up in time to get Selphie to her train the next morning.

They went to bed after midnight, and Rinoa stared at Squall's empty side of the bed, hugging his pillow, and feeling like the room was falling away around her.


	2. Chapter 2

Squall returned home two nights later.

Rinoa was outside, trying desperately to finish the current chapter in the book she was reading in the quickly waning sunlight, and losing the battle. At the end of the next paragraph she reached for the old receipt she was using as a bookmark, and paused, hand stretched towards the table, and took in a breath and smiled.

There was no clear indicator in partings of the toll it took on them to be separated, even if it could be felt in absence. Rinoa believed it was because the _idea_ of being away from each other was, at times, just as bad as physical distance-that she started missing him before he was even gone, and the line between simply blurred. Even when she was the one who left, no matter how short a time, she clung to the feeling of his arms around her, the lingering impression of their kisses goodbye.

Absence was a ringing in the ears-a dull pain in the background, until she lay in bed at night and it deafened her.

And right now, the ringing had stopped.

Rinoa closed her book over the receipt and stared absently at the cover, and felt the dark places inside her light up one-by-one the closer he got to home.

She turned when she heard the back door open, burning now with the need to see him, hold him. To know he was actually here. She wanted to apologize for the fight, to tell him how happy she was he was home, but he crossed the short distance from the door to her chair before she could open her mouth, and pulled her into a tight embrace, and the release that came with his touch left her breathless. His fingers pressed into her sides, and his breath was hot against her ear.

She kissed his cheek, and pushed lightly against him until he loosened his grip around her, and they stared at each other, faces shadows in the starlight. He started, and looked down, and Rinoa followed his gaze and watched him rub Angelo between the ears, and he gave her a quick hello. When they looked back to each other they smiled, and Rinoa leaned up and gave him another kiss.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I hate it when we waste our goodbye on a fight."

"Me too."

"I missed you," they said in unison, and Rinoa laughed.

"I know you probably wanted to go out, but I picked something up for dinner," Squall said. "We can go somewhere tomorrow if you want to, but I'm just too tired to deal with leaving home again tonight."

"A peace offering?"

"Something like that. Hopefully it will be enough for you to forgive me."

"That depends on what it is." Rinoa smiled, one corner of her lips drawn up with a coy look in her eyes. "Show me?" She threaded her fingers through his with one hand and reached for her book with the other, and they walked towards the door, arms pressed together as much as mobility would allow, Angelo trailing respectfully behind, before heading towards her bed, as if to say, _'he's home now. I'll give you two your space.'_

"Go into the living room," Squall told her. "I'll bring it to you."

"I can help you, you know. You had a longer day that I did."

"I think that's probably relative." He looked at her, and Rinoa leaned closer into him to hide from his gaze, unwilling to have this conversation so soon after his arrival.

She was afraid to let go of him, if she was honest with herself. Like she or he or both of them would float away without the powerful force of touch between them. She had told him as much on the phone the night before, stretched on the couch because she didn't want to spend another night in their bed without him. Not after the night before, when even under the influence of Selphie his being away had been so unbearable.

"Rin," he said.

"Just…let me help you."

He sighed, and kissed the top of her head. "And you tell me I'm hard to plan surprises for."

"Sorry," she said and pretended to look abashed, and Squall shook his head and turned towards a brown bag on the counter.

"Here is your 'sorry I had to leave on short notice and got home late on your birthday and was insensitive to you for getting upset over it' apology gift. Consider yourself surprised."

He slid two trays filled with gleaming pink fish over squares of rice from the bag, and turned to her with such a look of expectation that Rinoa burst into laughter.

"It's gorgeous-but look at you! You're really proud of yourself!"

"That's not all," he said. He reached behind the bag for a bottle Rinoa hadn't noticed before. "It's-"

"The one we tried in Dollet," she said. "The one we really liked. It doesn't make up for you having to leave, and I'd always rather have you here...but at least we get _something_ good out of it."

"I'm sorry, Rin. I-"

"-I know. Me too. It's not…it's not your fault. It's…"

Squall frowned, and Rinoa shook her head. "Not now," she said. "Let's just…let's eat, okay?" She slid her hand slowly from its place on his back, and picked up the trays of food and two sets of chopsticks. "You can tell me about your trip."

Squall reached for two wine glasses, clearly unhappy with her change in subject, but didn't try and fight it. "Not much to tell," he said. "Meetings. A lot of standing. You were right to be angry I had to leave, there was nothing about this job any 12 rank or above couldn't have done."

"You never figured out why it had to be you?"

"Notoriety," he said. "That's the only possibility that makes sense. Hoping to get more press for the event by having someone people know stand in the back of the room. Can you get the light?" Squall picked up their drinks and Rinoa turned out the light, not even realizing she'd done it with magic until Squall said, "That's not exactly what I meant, but that works."

"Oops." She let out a small laugh, and led the way to the couch. "I guess I'm distracted, listening to this important event that meant I had to wake up on my birthday alone. You know, I half expected Caraway to be involved, but I couldn't figure out what his motive would be. He's calculating, but not spiteful."

"It would have made more sense if he was involved. Putting me in a room full of politicians sends a message. Putting me in a room full of people with so much money they make a formal event out of giving it away is a waste of my time. And your time."

Rinoa nudged his leg with hers, and he wrapped an arm around her and pulled her closer to him.

"It's a waste of our time, Squall."

A look crossed his face Rinoa could not quite read, but was gone so quickly she wasn't entirely sure she'd seen anything at all. He handed her one of the wine glasses before picking up his own, and raised it towards her.

"Happy birthday," he said. "I'm sorry I missed most of it."

"You're here now. That's what counts."

"I mean it Rinoa. You know I would have been here, if I'd had a choice."

"I know," she said. "and I mean it too. You're here. And I don't care what day it is. You came home. Which makes today better than yesterday."

They clinked their glasses together and Rinoa took a sip, and wondered at her words.

Was that really what counted? Any time was better than no time, but did the last twenty minutes make up for the last two and a half days of listlessness? Of moving from room to room without even knowing where she was at times? If the first day he was gone was hard to handle, by the third day it was impossible, and that _terrified_ her. It was three days this time, but he would be gone for longer, one day. In a year and a half they had been lucky, between working together in Timber and his status from the war giving him the freedom to reassign most contracts that took him away for too long, if someone else was capable, but they knew it wouldn't last forever. Selphie was going to Trabia. Quistis was busy in Esthar for what was starting to feel indefinitely. And already they had seen that someone out there was willing to pay enough to have fame and prestige when all they needed was skill.

There would come a time, and Rinoa was certain it would be soon, where a contract would take him away for more than a few days at a time, and she didn't know what would happen to her when he was gone.

"-noa? Hey-"

"What?" She blinked, and turned to Squall. She was still holding her wine glass in midair, and he looked like he didn't know if he wanted to be worried or amused.

"…Where were you, just now?"

"I…" She took another sip and set down her glass, and picked up her chopsticks. "I'm just…thinking. Overthinking. Hey, I never got to tell you about Selphie and Irvine since you were so tired on the phone last night!"

She plucked a piece of sushi from the tray and shoved the whole thing into her mouth, and watched Squall while she chewed.

"No you didn't... But think I know where this is going," he picked up a piece and bit off half of it, with much more decorum than she had shown.

"Hw csh thew fo-" she swallowed. "How can you possible know where this is going? Did you talk to him?"

"No," Squall said. "But…nevermind. So, they broke up again?"

Rinoa nodded. "For real, this time. At least according to Selphie."

"That's…"

"Three times, since the war. But he…well, he didn't do anything _wrong_ -wrong, but he definitely did something Selphie-wrong, and I really, really don't know what he was thinking."

"Which was?"

"He _proposed._ "

She waited for the explosion of laughter-or the Squall equivalent thereof-but Squall only took another piece of sushi from the tray and leaned back into the couch and shook his head. "That idiot," he said.

"Okay, I was expecting at least a little bit of surpr-wait, you didn't know that was going to happen, did you?"

"He uh… It came up in conversation. I told him it was a bad idea."

"I should hope so. And what do you mean, came up in conversation?" She bit off half a piece of sushi and paused mid-chew, a thought coming to life in her mind she wasn't unfamiliar with, but wasn't about to explore unless he gave her more reason.

"Wrong choice of words," Squall said, and the thought she had quickly extinguished. "He asked me if I thought he should. I told him if he had to ask my advice the answer should be obvious."

"You realize he probably took that as a yes."

"Probably. But it was his mistake to make."

"Squall! My second best friend is moving to Trabia now because of you!"

"Neither place is exactly a day's drive. And I did tell him not to be impulsive and to think about their history. So, I tried."

"Balamb at least has beaches. And legitimate places to sleep when I go visit."

"Is this a bad time to remind you that you lived in a train car for over a year?"

"I had a bed, there. And it wasn't regularly below freezing. I'm really, really happy for her that she's going back, and she gets to help finish rebuilding. But I just can't believe Irvine didn't realize that a proposal would send her running completely in the other direction. He knew from the beginning she wasn't interested in commitment."

"Mmm," Squall said, and took another bite.

She waited for a minute to see if he would continue, and reached for her glass during the silence.

"I liked your train car," he finally said. "Or at least, I do now. In memory. It was rather jarring at the time."

"The rest of the Owls-"

"I know. You would never see that sort of thing at Garden, though. It wouldn't be allowed, even if anyone had the inclination."

"I miss my train, sometimes," she said. "Not the…garishness of it. But…"

Squall dropped his hand to rest on her leg. "But?"

"I ran away from home…from a _nice_ home. The kind of home where people who went to the stupid events you worked this week live. I ran away from that to live in a train and talk back to armed soldiers and try to _do something._ And now…now I can barely bring myself to shower when you aren't here. And even though I know why…that doesn't mean I understand it. When you're here, that me is here. But when you're gone… I'm just this insult to women everywhere. A weak little thing who lays in bed and despairs all day because I can't exist without my boyfriend."

Squall was quiet.

"Now is when you say something."

"You're not…you're not, Rinoa."

"Exactly. I'm not Rinoa."

"That's not what I meant."

"I know. But that's what _I_ mean. I know there's…more. I know what it is. But I just…I guess I thought in time we would get used to it. And instead it's…"

"It's getting worse?"

She nodded.

"I know," he said. He picked up his glass, and Rinoa watched him swirl the red liquid around, watched the way it coated the glass before fading back into the whole. "And…it worries me too. Sometimes...sometimes I think the part you are missing comes with me."

"What do you mean?"

He paused. "I'm not honestly sure."

She frowned, and he set his glass down and pulled her close. "I'm not ready to think about it," he said. "And at least tonight...it's probably best you don't try either."

"Just enjoy you being home?"

"Yes." He nodded, and kissed the side of her head.

They finished their sushi and refilled their glasses, and turned their conversation away from themselves back to their friends, to Rinoa's stories of the new businesses she had seen open in Timber, to her making Squall describe as much of the benefit dinner as possible. To going to bed early and laying beside each other reading, and to unhurried lovemaking before laying tangled together, hearts beating against each other.

Rinoa was nearly asleep, when Squall spoke, his voice a nearly indiscernible mumble that tickled her ear. "It didn't just…come up in conversation."

"Hmmm?" She shifted so her head lay more comfortably against his shoulder, teetering on the narrow edge between sleeping and awake.

He tightened the arm he had wrapped around her and lifted his head, and Rinoa fought to open her eyes. The lazy afterglow that had defined the mood in the room was different. Now it was not quite anxious, but was certainly no longer the gentle peace that had enveloped them before. She remembered the thought she'd had earlier, when taking about Selphie and Irvine, and any remaining pull of sleep let go of her without a fight.

"Irvine's plan. It came up because… I brought it up." He spoke more quickly now, and Rinoa tried to keep her breathing even. She felt like she was going to choke on the feeling of her heart in her throat. "Not to him. But I asked Zell… Well, he makes rings. But you already have one of my rings, and I was going to wait, but…to answer your question, it came up in conversation because he found out I was planning to. Propose. Rinoa-"

"Are you..." She inhaled, slowly, and asked on the exhale, "Are you answering my question with a question?"

"It seems that way."

She felt his entire body tense, and let his words hang, repeating them, making sure she knew what she was hearing.

Then she pressed herself as closely to him as she could manage, and brought her face to his.

"Good," she finally whispered, and kissed him the moonless dark of their bedroom. "Because I am answering your question with a yes."


	3. Chapter 3

That night, Rinoa dreamed of flying.

The air was cold and crisp against her skin, and she stretched her wings out and beat them into the wind. They sounded like strength, and every movement felt like power.

She was flying over the sea, endless blue stretched out in every direction _._ The depth of the sea spoke to her in color, now darker, now lighter, hyphenated by the cresting of so many waves. She circled and dropped, let her feet touch the water, felt it thread through her toes, and she gave a great beat with her wings and watched the ripples pulse around her from the force she created, and rose again.

She moved through the air without fear, and marveled at the feeling of freedom. She shared the sky with no one; even the clouds had taken their leave. The blue of the sky stretch and dipped and met with the sea, different shades meeting at the horizon. It reminded her of the white nothingness of Time, only this was her domain, and there was nowhere she could not fly.

Until, she grew weary. Until the water no longer looked peaceful, and the sky began to press against her, pinning her to the center of this world of blue, the white fingers of the waves calling her, reaching for her. She was tired and thirsty, and knew she was starting to panic. What had been freedom, was now a trap. She flew in what she hoped was the same direction, and fought the feeling that she was moving in one hopeless, horrifying circle.

And then, she was falling. Too exhausted to beat her wings any longer, Rinoa fell towards the sea, towards a place of darkest blue. She wanted to cry out, but could not muster the strength to open her mouth, wanted to cry, but the tears stalled.

She pulled her wings feebly against her body, and braced herself, opened her eyes to meet her fate head on…and watched, as what she thought was sea foam transformed into sails, what she thought was shadow into a small boat.

"Help…" she whispered…

...and too weak to slow herself down, Rinoa crashed through the deck of the sailboat and watched, through the growing darkness of the sea, the boat as it followed her into the water, and with it, the shape of a man.

.

She awoke coughing, and felt Squall stir beside her. In his sleep he took a few rapid breaths, and reached towards her. She coughed again, and looked around the darkness of their room, and felt for a minute like she was still in her dream, and their bedroom lay at the bottom of the ocean. She drew in a deep breath, if for no other reason than to prove that she could, and turned back to Squall.

"Hey," she whispered. "Squall." She moved her hand against his face, and paused when her fingers brushed against his hair-wet, and from more than just sweat from the humid Timber air.

"Squall," she said again, and leaned down and lay against him. She let the wet strands of his hair slide through her fingers, and kissed his shoulder, his chin, and placed a gentle kiss against his lips and gave him a gentle shake. "Wake up."

"Hmmm-"

"Squall?"

"Ri…"

He jerked awake, and she pressed her weight more tightly against him and whispered into his shoulder. "Shhhh. It's me. It's me."

"Rinoa-? What happened? Are you okay?" His voice was a mumble, and she watched the panic in his movements subside, sleep threatening to pull him back in.

"I'm fine," she said. "Just a bad dream. Squall… your hair-"

"In a… shipwreck."

"What?"

"'was…dreaming. Think I was in…a shipwreck."

"Your hair is wet."

"Mmm. Strange." He slid his arm around her and pressed his fingers into her back. "You're okay?"

She felt herself grow smaller in his embrace, safe and finally sure the dream had ended. She sighed, and started to relax. "I'm just…scared."

"I'm here, Rin," he said. She sighed again, and he kissed the top of her head. "You can sleep now. I'm here." She kissed him, and turned so she faced away from him, and he curled up behind her and pulled her close. She clung to his arms, and felt his thumb rubbing small circles over her hand.

"I know," she finally said. "I'm sorry for waking you."

"'s'okay." He buried his face into her neck, and Rinoa felt his breathing slow again, and it was soothing, and she felt herself relaxing against the rhythm, in the warm safety of his arms. Soon, she was asleep, and she did not dream again.

.

When she woke the morning sun lay slanted across the bedspread, and Squall was awake beside her. He was sitting up, a cup of coffee on the table next to the bed, and frowning at the screen of the tablet he held. He glanced down at her when she moved, and she watched his frown turn slowly, if not into a smile, into something warmer, something Rinoa knew as a look of love.

"Hi," he said, and brushed one of his hands against her face. She smiled against his fingers, and pulled herself up just enough to give him a kiss before sinking back into her pillow.

"Good morning. How long have you been awake?"

He looked like he was going to answer and paused, and Rinoa saw something in his face that brought a heavy feeling into her chest. She reached over and brushed her hand against his, and Squall clasped it, and sighed. "A few hours."

"It's wasn't-"

"Your dream? No," he said. "Not yours, at least."

She frowned, and pushed the covers back so she could sit up, and turned towards him. "You had one too?"

He nodded, and clicked the screen off on the tablet, and lay it down beside him on the bed. Rinoa felt his grip tighten around hers, and she moved so she could lean against him. He kissed the top of her head and pulled his hand away from from hers to wrap around her waist, and when he did not elaborate, she lay with her head against his chest, listening to his heartbeat, trying to memorize it, as she so often did after he had spent time away from home.

Finally he said, "It's one I've had a few times. I just…haven't told you."

"Squall-"

He shook his head. "You…you have enough dreams, Rin. Without sharing mine."

"You share mine, though. Literally." She tilted her head up to his. "That's not fair."

"No, I guess it isn't. But-"

"I mean it. Don't…" She paused, and took a breath, surprised at how upset she felt herself becoming. Because she was-worried? Squall had dreams before, dreams she could not see, but that woke him, panicked and sweating. Some he told her about-nightmares from the war, of the men he'd killed, of Edea's ice. Some, she knew only from the way he would cling to her, reach for her, desperate for any connection that proved she was still living and breathing beside him. He watched her more closely, after those dreams, and Rinoa often got the feeling he was making sure she didn't fade away.

But those dreams, she knew. She always knew, whether he talked about them or not. She looked at him and he was still watching her, waiting for her to finish a sentence she wasn't sure she'd meant to start. She let her head fall back to his chest, and said quietly, "Don't hide things like that from me. We don't…we can't."

"I know. And I'm sorry It's just that…this isn't a normal dream."

"Like my dreams are nor-"

"I know, I know. I heard it as soon as I said it." He smiled, and she wrinkled her nose at him.

"You're not off the hook for keeping this a secret that easily, you know."

"I know." He leaned down and kissed her forehead, and then continued. "I just mean, comparatively speaking. But it's a battle dream. I get them…usually after missions. Occasionally about the war, but usually about whatever job I just did, and that should be all that it is, but…"

"…but?"

The heaviness in her chest pressed harder against her, and in the pause before Squall continued she focused again on his heartbeat, counting them, feeling hers fall in and out of sync, willing it to ease her anxiety on whatever he was about to say.

"I need to bring something up that I don't want to, and this is why I haven't said anything to you before, so please know it's not because I'm keeping secrets. But you…"

She took a breath. "It's okay, Squall." _It's okay._

"Since you inherited the succession, you can use source magic."

"Right."

"But you can…hone it. Give up parts of yourself, give up control, in order to become stronger. Like the berserk spells we ran into with a few monsters, only-"

"Only far more terrifying." She shivered, and he held her closer. "And not something I can easily come back from, or anything that can be nullified with para-magic."

"Exactly. And in my dreams… I think that happens. To me. Not with magic, obviously, but I remember these missions, and it doesn't matter if they require action or not, but in my dreams I just…lose myself. I can see it happening, but I have no control. One minute I'm there, as myself, and the next I'm destroying everything and everyone around me. It's…"

"…awful." She spoke in a whisper, her voice caught, as the feeling in her chest moved into her throat.

"And I didn't want to tell you, because I didn't want to…to remind you."

"But Squall…" She blinked, and glanced down, struck by images from the war she'd rather not remember. She feared it, that loss of control, feared what could happen someday yet to come, more than she relived it in dreams, and he had been…

He moved his thumb in circles where it rested against her, and she pulled him closer, so he was no longer propped against the wall, and wrapped both her arms around him and held him tightly against her.

…he had been living it for how many nights, while she slept dreamlessly beside him.

"How long?" she asked.

"Since the war."

"And you never told me?"

"I never wanted to… Rin, I remember the few times you did that. And how awful it was for you. I didn't want to bring it up, to make you…I couldn't ask you to remember that, if you were able to find distance."

"But it's happening to you-Right beside me. I should know about that."

"It's not _actually_ happen-"

"If it's waking you up, it's happening." She loosened her embrace and leaned back so she could look at him, study him. His eyes were wilder than normal, lacking that stabilizing force she was used to when they caught each other's gaze. Wilder, and vulnerable.

 _Like mine,_ she thought. Or like he'd told her hers could be.

"Squall… You know as well as I do that dreams are just as bad as real life sometimes. Your hair was probably still wet when you first woke up, wasn't it?"

He reached his free hand to his hair, and then sighed. "You win," he said, and Rinoa shook her head.

"How often?"

"It varies. The longer I'm gone, the more likely it seems to be, though."

"So it's your version of moping around the house. I'm not sure which is worse."

"I don't think it's a joke, Rin. And you know the time isn't easy for me, either. I got a nasty email from Xu this morning about this last one. Seems Quistis has 'concerns.'"

"…should she?"

He didn't respond at first, and Rinoa looked towards the tablet.

"I don't know," he finally said. "It's just…not getting easier, leaving. I thought coming out here, getting away from Garden's shadow it might be, but…"

"You said yesterday...you feel like my missing parts go with you. This is what you meant?"

He nodded.

She looked at his chest, pictured the blood moving through his heart and the steady sound it made, and thought of how much her own heart hurt, knowing he would leave again, next week, next month, whenever the next contract came. At how hard it was, even saying goodbye for a few hours. For as much as she hated waking up alone, she sometimes wondered if it wasn't harder waking up beside him. Apart, she could try and numb herself to the pain of his absence, even if it took so much of herself away. But together, she felt certain sometimes she would burst from the intensity of desire, of needing to be as close to him as possible.

"It seems like we should be getting used to it by now, doesn't it?" she said quietly.

"Yeah."

"Are we…really supposed to, though? I mean, it's not like either one of us has a basis of comparison."

"No," he laughed. "That's definitely true."

"So maybe this _is_ normal. Even without the…things that make us different. I don't know. It's hard for me to imagine, loving someone this much, and being comfortable with you being gone. What would the point really be, if we were supposed to just kiss each other goodbye, and be completely okay going to bed alone at night?"

"I think the point would be we get through the day without missing each other so badly it's all we can think about. That it's…that it's not physically _painful_ when you aren't around."

"Well that's just boring," she said, knowing they both knew she didn't mean it. The emptiness of the last few days nudged at her, along with the feeling that she should be able to see her friends, pursue her own interests. The bookstore opened two months ago and she kept telling herself she should get a part time job, just to get out of the house, but when it was hard to motivate herself to take a shower in Squall's absence, she couldn't see how she manage to go to work. Much less leave _him,_ if she picked up a shift on the days he was home.

"You'll tell me though, the next time?" she asked. "I'm not an expert on interpreting dreams, but I'm starting to feel like I might be on having them."

"I'll tell you," he said, and reached out and grasped her hands, and leaned in and kissed her forehead. "Want me to go get you coffee? Or do you want to come downstairs? I have a call with Xu in an hour, but I'm all yours until then."

"I'll come down," she said, and he nodded and slid towards the edge of the bed. He kissed her again before picking up his coffee mug, and she watched him stand, followed him as he walked the length of the room. He paused in the door, and turned to look at her.

"…What?" she asked, when he did not move.

"You. Just…I never get tired of seeing you like this."

She felt her lips turn up into a shy smile, and after another moment, he turned, and Rinoa heard him on the stairs. A door opened and closed, and a minute later Angelo padded into the room, and took her spot on the floor on Rinoa's side of the bed.

She flopped back onto her pillow, and lay for a few minutes, taking in what Squall had just said, her own dream still fresh in her mind. She thought of the night before-of the simple magic before they fell asleep, and reached for her necklace, listening to the _clink_ as the rings fell against each other.

 _Engaged?_

He hadn't mentioned it since waking, but then, neither had she. Rinoa slid two fingers through each of the rings, and thought about the significance of both. Neither ring was ever meant to be hers, at least not at the time they came to her. And yet, they had become talismans. On the rare occasions she swapped the necklace out for something more formal, she still kept the rings somewhere on her person. Without them she was exposed, though to what she could not say.

She dropped the rings and splayed her fingers out in front of her, and wondered. Did she want a new ring? Did she even need one? She'd worn a symbol of commitment around her neck for most of her life, had worn _his_ symbol since he was still avoiding eye contact.

She thought of their conversation last night, when the night was warm and they were the only thing that mattered. Of him curled around her after she woke from her nightmare, even of this morning, and the longing she had to be as close to him as she could, to feel his blood pumping in her veins. Cocooned together, they created more than a ring could ever represent. In his embrace, she felt her pieces connect, all the rough edges smooth into a quiet whole, and all the aching she felt when he wasn't there faded away. The world could turn to chaos around them, and in his arms she would still be able to drift peacefully off to sleep.

She didn't need a ring to bind her to Squall; all she had to do was take a breath. The bond was already there.

* * *

 _Sorry for the delay in updating! Part of it was working on a Zell-centric piece for The Successor challenge, part of it was that August was an absurdly busy month, but most of it was that this story is turning out to be kind of a challenge to write! I'm about to hit my busiest time of year at work, but I will work on this as often as I can since I really want to tell to story._

 _i also realized while editing this that I am a terrible Rinoa-writer in that I chronically forget about Angelo! So I ret-conned her into the last two chapters. She doesn't really have a role in this (that I'm aware of at least), but I felt bad once I realized I should have at least acknowledged her... I think the inclusion of Angelo is the litmus test for whether the writer is a dog-owner or not!_

 _Thanks to everyone who has left feedback so far!_


	4. Chapter 4

The call came two weeks later, on the first day of spring.

They were at the park, after a late breakfast ("Brunch," Rinoa had corrected him. "If you're given ballroom dancing lessons, I know Garden taught you dining habits of people who can afford to rename their meals."). The sun broke evenly that morning, and now, nearing midday, Rinoa watched the thin sliver of moon though the bright green buds on the trees, and thought she felt a sense of sadness flowing through it from so many thousands of miles away.

"It's the sun's turn now," she told it. "It's your time to rest. Thank you for keeping us safe."

She took a few more moments to watch, and wondered if she could remember a time when the moon lingered, on the day spring came. She decided it was not true sadness, but a melancholy feeling; as the days grew longer the moon would have fewer hours to bathe the world in her own light, but more time to see through the eyes of the sun. She mourned her time missed in the last night she held dominion, but was glad to bear witness to the return of her lover.

 _I know the feeling,_ Rinoa thought.

She looked away from the sky to an open space where Squall had been throwing a ball for Angelo, and frowned. Angelo was still running happily back and forth, but Squall was on the phone, and his body language was stiff. A chill ran through her, and Rinoa fought back a surge of nausea.

"No," she said, and waited to walk towards him. Surely, this was just an annoyance. Something he could handle over the phone, even if he'd rather not have to deal with it. Or something easy, and she could come along as well. Since his return home on her birthday he'd only had to leave again once, and it was only to return to Balamb for a few days, and she went with him. She still hated to leave him, to say goodbye when he left for the better part of the day, but in the airy room of the Balamb hotel, against the sounds of the sea and without so much of _them_ in every room, on every wall, the way it was at home, she could bide her time with far less anxiety.

So maybe it was Balamb, again. Maybe it was Trabia, and she could visit Selphie. Or maybe…

She sighed. Angelo was running towards her, and Rinoa knelt down to greet her.

"It's bad news, isn't it?" she asked, and Angelo rubbed her head against Rinoa's arm in response. "That's what I thought."

She stood, and they walked slowly back towards Squall. He still had his back to her, and was gesticulating wildly with his free hand, but he grew still before she caught up to him. He dropped both hands and his shudders slumped, and when he finally turned she was ten feet away, and everything she needed to know was written all over his face.

He shook his head and started towards her, and the nausea rose again, along with a crippling fear, and in that fear, she knew. _This is it._ This was the call they'd known would come, the contract they were never going to avoid. "Squall…"

His lips were drawn into a tight line, and she could feel anger pulsing from him before he'd even reached her. When he did, he opened his arms and she leaned into his embrace.

They stood there, silent. He rested his chin on top of her head, and she could feel his eyes trained at some point in the distance, listened to his measured breaths. She closed her eyes, and tried not to imagine what he was about to say.

"When?" she finally asked.

"I leave tomorrow morning," he said.

"Tomorrow-"

"Rin." He loosened his arms around her and leaned back, and she looked at his face, and the fear grew stronger. "The team leaves tomorrow afternoon. Xu wanted me there today and I refused."

"I bet… I'm sure she took that well."

"Exactly like you'd imagine. But there's… I had a bargaining chip. It's not just when we leave. We're going to Centra-"

Her heart froze-

"-and there's no way of knowing when we'll return."

.

If she dreamed that night, Rinoa did not remember.

They woke early, and were quiet in the dark hours before sunrise. Squall got dressed and double checked his bag, and Rinoa made coffee, and they tried to pretend like it was a normal mission. He would only be gone for a couple of nights, and they would be able to check in with each other, and then he would be home, and they would put it behind them. In the year they had lived in Timber, that was their routine. It might not get easier, but there was a small comfort in knowing what to expect they had ignored until now.

Squall dropped his bags by the front door, and Rinoa met him in the living room and handed him a mug. The house always seemed darker in early morning than it did at night, and their eyes met in the dim lamplight. He looked exhausted, and Rinoa saw worry in his eyes, worry she did not usually see before he left. She reached up and brushed her hand against his cheek, and he sighed.

"I wish I could say something," he said. "I wish I knew enough to have something to say."

"I know."

He took a sip of coffee and set the mug down on the end table, and drew her towards him. Pressed against his chest she measured her breathing against his heartbeat, and it reminded her of weeks ago, laying in bed, and hearing the same sound as she fought the same feeling of helplessness.

"Your dreams-" she started, and then paused. _What about them?_

"They're dreams, Rin."

"But what if this time…this time is different. What if they aren't dreams? What if they're predictions?"

"Will knowing that now change anything?"

"It will…"

He tightened his hold around her, and she tried to relax, to lean into his emotions. If she could feel what he was feeling, maybe she could hold onto that while he was gone, draw them out and lay beside them at night when he wasn't there.

At first she felt only her own concern, and wondered if any chance of reaching through to him was stuck on the knot in her throat, and the tightness in her chest. And then-she found him. She felt fear, along with anger and regret. But mostly, she felt love. She felt it running through him, moving between them. It was powerful, and threatened to take hold of her, suffocate her. It was the love she felt for him multiplied, made stronger in their embrace and in the knowledge that it could be months before they could hold each other again. She closed her eyes and let it envelope her, and when it became too strong for her to feel like she could hold any longer, she gasped, and as she did, Squall's hands moved from her back as if burned.

She stepped back and he stared at her, wide-eyed, and slowly placed his hands against her shoulders.

"What..?" he asked.

She shook her head. "It was you," she said. "I think."

"Me?"

"I wanted to… I tried to feel what you were feeling. It was so strong…"

"That wasn't just me. I felt it…I felt the change. It felt like… Well, like my skin was gone. Like everything inside of me was free to move into you. Like we were air. And then you-"

He pulled his hands away and held them, palms up, and she could see bright red lines running over them.

"Squall…" she reached for his hands, and stopped, and stared at her own. The veins on her fingers pulsed brightly, fading even as they watched. He took one of her hands in his, and traced the lines with one of his fingers.

"They're warm," he said. He brought his free hand to her face and brushed aside her hair, and looked at her, brows furrowed.

"My eyes?"

"Normal," he said. "They're normal. They're yours."

She let out a breath, and fell against him once again, not, this time, out of desperation, but relief.

"I don't want to leave you," he whispered into her hair, sincerity rough in his voice, and Rinoa blinked back tears.

"I don't want you to leave."

"I'll call, as soon as I get to Balamb. And again, when I know what communication will look like. Rin…"

"Yeah?"

"Promise me…you'll leave, if you need to. Go see Selphie. Or Ellone. Even Zone, as much as I hate to say it. Find someone. I can't…I can't think about you here by yourself. Not knowing what it's like for you."

"Squall-"

"Please, Rinoa. I need to know you'll be okay."

"I'll…"

She felt the barriers between them fading again, and wondered, how could he expect her to make that promise? She wouldn't be okay without him. Not when she needed him to breathe.

But it could be weeks, if not months. And in that time…

"I'll call someone," she finally said. "So at least I'm not alone."

"Thank you."

He leaned down and brushed his lips against hers, and she reached her arms behind him and pulled him in. The kiss burned, and she welcomed it. She wanted it to burn an impression that would last through his time away, that would stay with her like a brand. The kiss burned, and it brought fire into her veins, and she tasted need on his lips, felt it in his touch. He reached one hand into her hair and slid his other up her shirt, down her back and under the waistband of her pants, and she gasped, and pulled him closer.

"You'll miss your train," she whispered into his ear, grazing it with her teeth, and brought her hands around to his belt.

"No, I won't."

He pinned her against the front door, and in moments thrust inside her, and all the longing, all the build-up since he got the phone call yesterday, they took out on each other. It was anger, it was passion, and it was a reminder that they were all that existed in the world, and in the climax Rinoa knew, _knew,_ this was not the end. They would see each other again, and it would be soon. There was too much between them, for the world to keep them apart.

She told him that. Twenty minutes later, standing on the train platform in the same thin pants and t-shirt of his she'd pulled off the floor that morning, she leaned in and whispered it in his ear before he stepped onto the train that would carry him away from her.

He gripped her hand, and paused, and looked at her, their faces flat in the gaslight of the station lamps.

"I believe you," he said.

"I love you."

"I love you, too."

And with a last, soft kiss, he disappeared on the train. She stayed on the platform until it pulled out of sight, and drove in silence back to their house. The sun was rising when she got home, and when she opened the front door her eyes swept over the dim grey of their living room. Squall's coffee mug was still on the end table where he'd left it, cold and mostly full. She felt tears in her eyes and shook her head, and stepped forward to take the mug-and stopped.

On the carpet beside the table, exactly where they had stood when she felt the lines between them dissolve, were two sets of scorch marks, in the perfect shape of their footprints.

* * *

 _Anyone who participated in/read the submissions for Where I Belong may note that my participation in that was pretty high-especially compared to The Successor challenge last month, where I barely scraped out a single one shot. I also started working on The Successor-my story, not the challenge-that year, only to find out less than a week after I posted the first chapter that I was pregnant (which I kind of suspected at the time but figured I'd start the story anyway)._

 _Apparently, that's a thing for me. Because I started this story near the end of July, and less than a week after the first chapter, got confirmation that I had in fact, once again, found inspiration to start a new full-length story immediately following the conception of a child. (Insert "well my husband is a writer" jokes here). So-surprise! The reason I didn't do much for this year's challenge, and why I went over a month without an update on this, is because my brain lately has been completely occupied by first-trimester ickies, with the added fun of already having a toddler. But if I was able to complete one story during pregnancy and having a newborn, surely I can do it again...right?_


	5. Chapter 5

**_.Day 1._**

Rinoa reheated Squall's cup of coffee, and carried it with her to their small back porch, and finished watching the sun rise. The morning air carried a chill, and the cherry blossoms that hung over the edge of the railing winked at her, low golden sunbeams hitting drops of dew.

It was a beautiful morning.

The day would not be warm, but the sun would be bright, and the air would be clear. If Squall were home, it would be a _do things_ day for him. Cleaning gutters, clearing out the lawn debris left by the last winter storms. He would be outside working, and she would be outside reading, and halfway through the day they would walk downtown and get lunch, and she would impulsively decide today was the day to start the vegetable garden she'd wanted since she moved to Timber to live on a train.

She didn't know the first thing about gardening, but Squall would not point that out to her. He would tell her _he_ didn't know anything about it, and that she shouldn't expect him to be able to help, and they would laugh, and she would do it anyway.

Rinoa wondered about this imaginary garden, and how well it would do. She pictured uneven rows with random bursts of flowers and herbs growing between thriving vines, and bringing baskets of fresh vegetables to the homeless shelter every week. Angelo would chase the squirrels away for her, and she'd figure out the rest as she went along. She pictured kneeling between rows of flowering plants and trying to get over her fear of bees, and she pictured Squall watching her with a look of amusement.

"You'll see it," she said, and sipped at the remains of her coffee, trying to hold onto the vision. She felt the pulse of darkness in her chest that had formed as soon as he got the call yesterday, and looked at the cherry tree, at the space of grass where she would plant her garden, and fought against it, hoping to keep it small for as long as she could. "You'll see it, because you'll be home."

Rinoa finished her coffee and went inside. She looked at the kitchen counter, where two wine glasses still sat, globes stained red, and set her coffee mug- _his_ coffee mug-in the sink beside the one she had finished before they left, and took a deep breath.

It did not feel like he was gone, even if everything inside her knew that he was.

She showered and changed into jeans and one of Squall's thicker sweaters, and looked at Angelo, who lay on the bed watching her.

"Let's go out," she said. "It's a nice morning for a walk."

Angelo jumped off the bed and headed for the front door, and Rinoa followed her. She was careful to step past the burn marks in the carpet, careful not to even look down.

That night, before she went to bed, Rinoa closed their bedroom door and knelt beside a small table, and lit a single white candle. Focused on the flame, she pictured Squall walking through the front door, and a small prayer for his protection.

The candle cast a dim glow as she fell asleep, and in his empty space on their bed, she felt the darkness from before pulse beside her.

 ** _.Day 3._**

 _"Engaged?"_

Rinoa held the phone back from her ear and tried to smile, to find something to pretend to match Selphie's enthusiasm.

"Yes, Selph. For the fourth time."

"But Rin… _Engaged!_ Squall Leonhart actually proposed, which is just insane to begin with, but you _didn't tell me?_ "

"I'm telling you now." Rinoa frowned, "And it's not insane. He's-"

"I know, I know. I shouldn't have said that, of course you two were always going to be together no matter what so it's not like it's a surprise, but I guess it _feels_ surprising since we aren't around you anymore to constantly be reminded of how lovesick you guys are."

"Thanks, I think."

"It's a compliment. But Rin, you said he did it on your birthday but that was three weeks ago! Does anyone else know?"

"Ellone does, which means Laguna does too, though I'm not sure if Squall told him directly." She paused. "And…Zell and Irvine probably know."

"Rinoa, you cannot possibly mean that Squall told them before you called me? I'm in Trabia, not on the moon!"

"He didn't _tell them,_ tell them. Actually, and you have to promise not to be mad at him for this, but he thinks it might be his fault Irvine-well, you know."

Selphie started laughing so hard Rinoa felt like she was going to drop the phone, and couldn't help but smile at it in spite of herself. "Selph?"

"Oh Rin. Irvy's a hopeless romantic. I promise there is nothing Squall could have said or done that planted that seed. Why do you think we set boundaries in the first place? I want to build a rocket ship that can travel to the furthest reaches of space, and he wants to have kids one day! I've never been anything but honest about what we are, but he's still convinced he can be happy giving up that life he dreams about."

"You're using present tense?"

"Well…"

Rinoa smiled, a genuine smile, and hoped her friend could hear it in her voice. "It sounds like I'm not the only one keeping secrets." She walked into the kitchen and filled a glass with water, and listened to Selphie tell her about the last weekend, when Irvine showed up at Trabia out of nowhere to apologize, and how he admitted he wasn't respecting her boundaries, but they could still have some good times, and it was a shame to walk away from that over something that really wasn't a good idea anyway.

"So what does that mean?" Rinoa asked, settling back into an armchair.

"It means we have some good times. And Rinoa, did we have some _good_ times. I know you don't usually share that stuff about you and Squall, but Rin, the last weekend was just _mind-blowing._ I mean, I'm not going to say no to more of…"

Rinoa did not hear the rest of Selphie's sentence, her eyes fixed on the front door. She bit her lower lip and closed her eyes, and for a moment, could _feel_ the heat of a few days before. She wanted to close her arms around it, keep the phantom energy that swelled up pressed against her until it took shape, and could embrace her in return.

"-noa?"

"What?"

"I lost you, didn't I?"

"Sorry. I was just-"

"Thinking about some mind-blowing times of your own?"

Rinoa stared hard at the door again. "Yes, actually," she said.

"Mmm-hmm," Selphie mused. "I know some of our best times are right before and right after I get sent on a mission. And you know, we're okay going awhile without seeing each other. When he gets back from Centra-"

"-Selphie…"

"I'm just saying, I'm jealous of the sex your'e going to have the next time you two see each other. If that SeeD joke about the better you are at fighting, the better you are at fucking is true, you're a lucky woman."

" _If_ we ever see each other."

Rinoa shifted, and tried to get comfortable. The earpiece on her phone was getting warm, and she was having trouble staying focused on their conversation, her mind stuck somewhere between two days ago and every time before he'd been gone, and between worry. Other than the promised phone call before he left Balamb, she hadn't heard from Squall, even in her dreams.

"He'll be back, Rin." Selphie said quietly, and Rinoa heard a door open and close on the other end of the line, followed by distant voices.

"I know," she said.

"He wants to marry you. He'll make sure he comes home for that. Anyway, it's Squall. I get he has to come when he's called and all, but he'll negotiate something that gets him back. You know he hasn't gone this long without any extended contracts out of luck."

"I know," she said again. "Sorry, I didn't mean to be a downer. I just…"

"You miss him." All humor and goading was gone from Selphie's voice, replaced with quiet understanding, and Rinoa had to ask herself why she had been so hesitant to share the news of her engagement. Because she was worried about a reaction in a level of enthusiasm she couldn't quite reach?

Yes. But she had all but forgotten that Selphie was more than that, as so many often did, or that her friend could always tell the difference in when a situation called for laughter, and when it called for a friendly ear, even if she often chose to pretend otherwise.

"I do, Selphie. I know he just left, but I don't know when he'll be back and that just makes it harder."

"Has he called?"

"Right before they left Balamb."

"Well, Quistis hasn't been able to correspond much since she's been down there, but when she does she's been fine. Comm lines are just really unstable and she said they try and save feed time for official communication only, so the line doesn't die before they say what they need to. I guess that happens a lot."

"Squall said that was likely the case before he left. I'm not worried. Not yet at least. I'm just.."

"Want to come up to Trabia?"

"How much snow do you have?"

"Just a few inches!"

"We have flowers blossoming on the trees. And I didn't have to wear my coat today."

"Well if you change your mind…" The voices in the background on Selphie's end grew louder, and Rinoa reached for her water.

"Sounds like you have to go."

"I do. I'm sorry, I've got-"

"No worries. I'm glad we got to talk."

"Me too! And look, don't think you're off the hook for me helping you with wedding plans. We didn't even get to start talking about it! Did you talk about a date?"

"No, but I've pretty much decided we're doing it as soon as he comes home."

"I can work with that."

Rinoa smiled, and listened to Selphie greeting a few people. They said goodbye and Selphie promised she would call again soon, and Rinoa pulled her phone away and disconnected the call. She stared at the picture she had set as the background of her and Squall, one she'd taken during a walk earlier in the year, in the first Timber snowfall since they'd moved there.

"I miss you," she said, and shut down the screen on her phone.

She looked one last time to the front door, but this time, the heat from before did not come.

 ** _.Day 7._**

She did not get out of bed until almost noon.

Years ago, in her father's house, that might have been normal.

Then she lived on a train, and the station whistles and shouts of the rest of the owls woke her up.

Then she lived with a SeeD, who was up by five-thirty regardless, and if she never managed to synch to his pattern entirely, the smell of coffee and the absence of his warmth beside her in their bed called to her before the day got too late.

Sleeping was when the dreams came, anyway. It was easier sometimes, to be awake. She knew she could fight off whatever came to her while she was awake.

Until he left.

Rain had settled in during the night. When Rinoa woke the first time, the window showed the faintest break of dawn, and she curled her legs to her chest and fell back asleep, and every time after that when she opened her eyes the room was the same dull grey. The rain sounded like thousands of needles falling from the sky, small and sharp enough to make the ground bleed. Even cocooned under the covers she could tell a chill had returned to the air.

It was a day to stay in bed, even if she wasn't alone. But she was. And so, she slept again, and woke again, and slept again, and continued until she could not trick herself into falling asleep anymore.

Angelo whined from the foot of the bed, and Rinoa pulled one arm out of the covers and patted the space normally occupied by Squall, and Angelo scooted beside her, and laid her head across Rinoa's stomach. She draped her arm around the dog and sighed.

"At least you're here," Rinoa told her, for probably the hundredth time in the week Squall had been gone. Angelo sighed in return, and Rinoa reached for the book she had placed on the nightstand and picked it up, and read until the need to pee and the thought of coffee were too strong.

Standing in the kitchen, waiting for the pot to finish brewing, she watched the thin white streaks of rain through the window, and locked her jaw against the knot in her throat, and the sting of tears in her eyes. It was cold outside. It was cold outside, and it was cold inside, and _she_ was cold, and she was alone.

She poured a cup of coffee and checked her phone for new messages, and was slightly less disappointed than the day before when there weren't any.

 ** _.Day 10._**

The rain continued, and the temperature refused to warm. It felt like winter, and it was not until she decided to go the store that Rinoa realized she had not showered or changed out of her pajamas in almost a week. She thought of Squall's last words to her, and felt, at once, ashamed. She told him she would be okay…hadn't she? Or at least, that she wouldn't stay here alone. And outside of one phone call with Selphie that she hadn't even initiated…alone she was.

So, she showered, and changed, and looked at herself in the mirror and brushed wet bangs out of her eyes.

"You look terrible," she told herself.

She had dreamed that night. In her dream, she sat on a hill overlooking a barren valley, as Squall slept among a small group of SeeDs. At one point in the night someone woke him, and he and another figure Rinoa did not recognize moved to the edge of the ground of sleeping men and women and took their turn on watch. At one point, he looked in her direction. She did not move, afraid his watch partner would mistake her for a threat, but in her dream she felt him watching her in return, and was sure he knew it was her.

Now she pressed at the dark circles under her eyes, and wondered how much of it was just a dream. Had she actually seen _him_? It was day for him, when night came to Timber. Could they dream across time? She shivered at the thought, and focused instead on the normalcy of what he was doing in the dream.

"At least you know he's alive," she told herself.

Rinoa picked up her purse and told Angelo she would be back soon, side-stepping the burn marks on the carpet, and gasped at how cold it actually was outside when she opened the door.

She made it to the end of the driveway before deciding it wasn't worth it trying to do anything with the weather like this. She would order a pizza for dinner, and hope the rain let up by tomorrow. She turned back towards the house, pausing when she saw the mailbox.

"Please," she said.

She pulled out a week's worth of junk mail and what looked like a few stray bills, and ran back into the house, crouched over to protect her armful of paper.

But there was no letter from Squall.

She forced herself to stay in her jeans the rest of the day. She emptied the kitchen cabinets and cleaned them, hung two pieces of wall art they'd bought at a street fair in Dollet and never could decide on where to place, and over pizza and the last bottle of beer in the fridge, Rinoa spent the evening searching for pictures of weddings far more elaborate than either of them would want, and writing down ideas they might actually use.

 ** _.Day 13._**

The sun finally came out on Thursday. After a week of rain, the sun seemed brighter than normal, and the ground outside was beaten and worn. Cheered by the change in weather in spite of herself, Rinoa poured her coffee into a tumbler instead of a mug, and changed out of Squall's sweater into one of her own, and met Angelo at the door.

They went to the park, and Rinoa watched Angelo burn off a week's worth of pent up energy and, Rinoa imagined, no small amount of her human's sullen mood. She tried not to think of the last time she was at the park, and was surprised at how easy it was to do.

Around lunchtime, she called to Angelo and hooked her back onto her leash, and they took the long way home, past the train station, towards the side of town with a café that had survived the Galbadian occupation, one she liked before SeeD, and before Squall.

Just past the station, Angelo tugged against her leash, and Rinoa looked ahead, and frowned at the back of the head of someone standing near the bus stop.

"Dr. Kadowaki?" she asked, once they were in earshot. The woman turned around, and Rinoa felt at once like she was under scrutiny.

"You lost weight," Dr. K. said, and Rinoa stared at her, unsure of how to respond, too surprised by her presence in Timber at all. "And you didn't have much to lose to begin with."

"I…"

"He was right, I guess."

Angelo pulled again at her leash and Rinoa took a step forward, and Dr. K. bent down and gave her companion a pat on the head.

"He? –Squall? You've talked to him?"

Finally Kadowaki smiled, and opened her arms. "Come here, Rinoa. You're a mess right now."

She stepped forward and gave the doctor a brief hug, but did not smile back. "It's not that I'm not happy to see you, but… Well, I'm surprised."

A horrible thought crossed her mind briefly that might explain the doctor's presence, one Rinoa quickly dismissed. _No,_ she told herself. _He's fine. You'd know if he were… You would know._ She certainly wouldn't have woken up in a better mood that she'd managed to find since he left.

"I am too, to be honest. There was a time I used to tell Squall what to do, not the other way around, you know."

"That's the second time you've mentioned him."

"It won't be the last. Were you going somewhere just now?"

"Just to get lunch."

"I'd like to join you, then," she said. "I'll buy."

Rinoa shook her head but agreed, and while they walked, Kadowaki told her she'd had business at G-Garden, and that she had promised Squall before he left Balamb that she would find the time to come to Timber if she happened to find herself on the Galbadian continent. That he was worried about leaving for so long, and wanted to know someone he trusted would check in.

"Not like G-Garden and Timber are right next door, and he should know. But sometimes when he talks I see the Commander, and sometimes I see the little kid I've spent years sewing back together. I can't say no to either, and when he talks about you, I see both. He told me you're getting married?"

"He did?"

"Aren't you?"

"No—I mean, yes, we are… I guess sometimes I'm still surprised when he shares his personal life. But I guess you're different. You're the only person there he truly trusts, you know."

"He's not wrong to feel that way, either. A signature on a sheet of paper could have him and Quistis contracted to kill each other, after all."

"Or him and Xu," Rinoa said around a smile. She knew Squall and Xu got along in their own way, but Xu had always—but especially lately—been the most likely to put Garden over anyone she saw as a threat. And Xu did see Rinoa as a threat.

Kadowaki laughed, and Rinoa led them into the café, and felt her breath catch when they entered. She hadn't been here in close to a year, not since the last of the Deling forces finally left and the resistance groups came here to celebrate. The owners had done a remarkable job restoring and redecorating, but they had left one wall unfinished. It was still riddled with bullet holes, and beneath each one, someone had etched in a name. She walked towards the wall and ran her fingers over the indentations, let the memories of the dead move from the wall to her hand, and murmured a gentle prayer.

"Timber's dead?" Kadowaki asked, stepping beside her.

Rinoa nodded. "Resistance members, who were killed during the occupation. We talked about doing something like this somewhere, but I didn't know it was here."

"You haven't been here before?"

"I have. But not for awhile. The last time I was here…" she felt her stomach tighten at the memory. "I lost a friend, you could say."

"Lost as in—"

"No, no one died. But one of the resistance members I fought with… He didn't like Squall from day one, and since my… _coma,_ shall we say, that dislike got a little stronger. We had a big party here the night Deling officially left, and Zone got a little drunk and confronted him, and tried to start a fight. Zone uh…well, you know what happens to people who fight Squall."

"Laid him out, I bet."

"Zone was so drunk Squall knocked him out with one punch. And he didn't want to. He tried to get him to back off, I tried, other people tried, we even tried to just leave. But Zone took a swing. And then he took a second swing and Squall had just had enough." She shrugged. "Like I said, they never liked each other. We haven't come back here since. I'm the one who changed. Zone shouldn't have to give up something he earned. But since I'm…alone, I thought it might be safe."

Kadowaki stared at her for just long enough to make her uncomfortable, and Rinoa turned her attention to the counter, and stepped forward to place her order. They did not say anything else until they were seated, and Kadowaki spoke first.

"You can come to Garden if you want," she said.

"Not in a million years," Rinoa spat out, too quickly.

"You wouldn't have to be alone, there."

"I would be _more_ alone there. It's hard enough being there _with_ Squall. Without him?" She shook her head. "Timber is my home."

"Rinoa…"

A server Rinoa did not recognize brought their food to the table, and Rinoa watched Kadowaki's face. As a doctor, Kadowaki had a neutral facial expression that could rival Squall's, but right now, Rinoa swore she saw sadness in it. "…What?" she asked.

"It's…going to be awhile, in Centra."

"How long is awhile?"

Kadowaki shook her head. "He may be able to come home to visit in a few months. But the team that's down there? They're not coming home for a year at least."

"But it's a…what did Squall say Xu had called it? A sting team?"

"That's what Quistis was doing. Squall's not down there to help take out a few rogues. They called him in for his leadership."

Rinoa pulled two pieces of bacon from her sandwich and passed it under the table to Angelo, and took in this news.

It made sense, after all. The urgency, the lack of notice. Why it had to be him, when he made it a point not to accept extended missions if anyone else could do them. And, Rinoa thought, she had really known the whole time that this was different, that it was not an A Rank SeeD they needed, but Commander Leonhart

So why, _why_ was something inside of her still so certain she would see him soon?

"Rinoa?"

"Are you married, Dr. K.?" she asked, and felt her eyes widen, the question surprising even to herself.

Kadowaki took a sip of tea, and nodded. "I was."

"Was?"

"He died, a couple of years before the Kramers brought me into Garden. I've known Edea since she was a child. I have a certain level of familiarity with people she thought her organization might be likely to encounter. So when they started hiring, she recruited me."

"You—what?" Rinoa stared at her. "But you didn't know what happened to me?"

"I suspected. But then Squall ran off with you before I felt comfortable saying anything. To him or to Edea. Of course, when he did that I realized I needn't have worried."

Rinoa reached for her tea, and took in the information, then asked, "How long were you married?"

"Nearly twenty years. We met as teenagers, and, not unlike you two, knew pretty early on there was no point in looking any further."

"Was it hard, being away from each other? Before, um… before he died, that is."

Kadowaki smiled, a nostalgic smile that gave Rinoa a sense of happiness in spite of herself. "It was at first. That's normal, though. It gets easier, after awhile, and eventually you don't notice as much. You still miss each other, but you start to welcome the times when you can remind yourself of who you are outside of your marriage."

"I feel like…we're not getting there."

"There's no timeline for it, Rinoa. I can't tell you when the honeymoon phase wore off for Phil and I, but it might just take longer for you two. After all, you've got a more unique set of circumstances than most."

"I know. But it's not just that it isn't getting easier. It's actually getting _harder._ And not just this time, even the shorter times, before. Even when it's not work, if one of us just runs to the store. And it doesn't feel the same as it did at first, when it was…just a matter of wanting to stay close. It _hurts._ I want to get a job. Despite what my reputation at Garden may suggest, I hate being Squall's arm candy. I want to do important work, but I'd be happy selling books, or serving coffee, just to know the total of my existence is more than waiting for Squall and carrying a huge secret, but… When he's home, I don't want to leave, because he's here. And when he's gone… I feel like everything is a blur. It's not that I'm not _interested_ in doing things, but I can't _concentrate_ on anything. I start to, and it shifts. Like the world is moving at a normal pace, and I'm turned just a few degrees slower, without him. And I just get…dizzy. And sad."

Kadowaki nodded, and Rinoa was not surprised to see the neutral expression was back, and she bit her lower lip and looked down at her plate. After several minutes Kadowaki still had not responded, and Rinoa said, very quietly, "I just wish he would call."

"I know, sweetie."

They finished eating, and Rinoa invited Dr. K. back to their house, but she declined, not wanting to risk missing her train later in the afternoon, and they said goodbye outside the café.

On the way home, Rinoa bought a bright ceramic pot filled with live daffodils, and a smaller container of rosemary. She checked the mailbox, and was not surprised to find the it empty.

 ** _.Day 16._**

 _Rinoa,_

 _I'm writing this two days after we arrived, but I don't know how soon you will get this, so however long it has been, I'm sorry for making you wait, and I'm sorry I haven't called. The communication network is unstable, and for now the only line we have is a direct feed to Garden. Now that more of us are down here we may be able to start calling outside numbers in a couple of weeks, but no sooner._

 _I miss you. I dreamed about you the first night. Part of me wants you to see me in a dream, but I worry about what that means for you. With the time difference I don't know if it's possible. Can we dream across time? It seems possible, given everything else._

 _Quistis says hello. She was not surprised at all to hear about Irvine and Selphie, though I have not told her about us. Even I can tell it's still somewhat of a sore subject, whether she admits it or not. I did tell Kadowaki, though, and asked if she would be able to stop by and see you if she went out to Galbadia for any reason. I can hear you telling me you don't need someone checking in on you, so when I get home, you can give me hell for that. Maybe you've seen her already, and that's old news. But if you haven't, don't be surprised if she stops by._

 _There's no easy way to say this, but you expect bluntness from me by now. I won't be home anytime soon. I knew when Xu called it would be awhile, we all know when Centra is mentioned, but it's becoming less political, and more militarized, and that means I'm here long-term. I can't say any more right now. Rinoa—please find something to do. I know you won't go to Garden, but you've talked about getting a job at the bookstore. And there's my family, in Esthar. I've felt you with me since I left, and it only reminds me that you are alone. If you can't stay home, there are people you can go to. (I sound like you, don't I? You're wearing off on me.) Whatever you do, do something. Plant the garden you were so excited about having last year._

 _You can send mail to the address on the envelope. Quistis has already requested coffee. With Xu down here now as well she's lost her supply. I wouldn't say no to that request, either, hint hint. (Look—a joke—you have proof for Selphie the next time she doubts that I do, in fact, have a personality.)_

 _I love you. If I miss you this much today I don't know what it's going to feel like next week, or next month. If I can reach you in any way I will, and if I can find you a dream, I will._

 _-Squall_

 ** _.Day 17._**

 _Squall,_

 _Two weeks—that's how long it took your letter to arrive. If mine takes just as long, you'll be reading this a month after you left._

 _It's been easier so far than I thought it would, which is not to say it's been easy. Kadowaki did stop by—we went to that café, the one where you knocked out Zone. They put the resistance memorial in there, rather than the Timber Maniacs building like I thought they would. It was weird going back. I've been in this town for five years and everywhere is history, and so much of it was before my time. You know they all acted during those months like we—you and I—had won Timber's freedom, but no one really meant it, and I never believed it anyway. I was the only person who wasn't too proud to go outside to get help, and you and I know the real reason things worked out the way they did, even if the rest of Timber doesn't. But the more things turn around here, the more things grow, the less I feel like this is a place that I belong. When you are here it's a place *we* belong, but without you, going to the old places, walking with the ghosts of Timber…it just reminds me that the me that started here is gone. I guess that's not what you expected me to say._

 _It makes you being gone harder. I am displaced in two ways, without you. I am a stranger in my own town, and I am half of a whole. You've been gone for two weeks, and one minute it might feel like you just left, and the next you feel so far away I wonder if I didn't just imagine our time together, and I've actually been alone, and this feeling is just the empty sadness you feel on waking from an especially pleasant dream. Am I longing for you? Or am I finally waking up?_

 _I did dream about you. When you write back, did you have a night on watch, about a week after you left, when you saw someone watching you from a nearby hill? I was afraid to move, but I felt like you knew I was there. But it was night for you and night for me, and I don't know how that works. I try not to think about what we can do with time, though._

 _I slept with your letter under my pillow last night, and it was the first night since you left I haven't woken up at least once. Do you think that's silly? You probably do. If you were here I know how you would Look at me for sleeping with a sheet of paper, but you're not here, or I wouldn't need to do it. So you can make that look of amusement when you read this. I'll picture it tonight, when I hear the paper crumple under the weight of my head._

 _You're right—I won't go to Garden. And I don't want to go to Esthar. But I might try and work. Maybe I can make this new Timber my own, just like I did when I first came here. I bought some rosemary. It seemed appropriate. It might not be a full garden, but smelling it when I walk past the gate is actually comforting. Maybe when you come home I'll have an herb garden instead._

 _-because you will come home._

 _I—sorry about the smeared paper, but I'm crying now. I haven't actually cried since you left, but even this little way of talking to you, and it finally broke._

 _I miss you so much. I know we'll see each other again, but the thought of going months—Kadowaki said it could be over a year—Squall, it hurts so much I can't breathe. The only way I can manage is to try not to feel anything at all, and that's not how I want to live. I just want you here. I know it isn't helpful to say that because we can't do anything about it, but right now it's just us, and I've been walking around pretending I'm going to be okay, and I_ _*will* be, and so will you, but we're not going to be completely okay until you're back and we're together. I already have so much to tell you, and it's nothing I can put into words._

 _Now that I know how to reach you, I'm not going to wait to hear from you before I write again. If it's not safe to get a lot of mail just tell me and I'll save my letters and send them all at once. But this way, at least I can reach you._

 _I love you. I really, really, love you._

 _-Rinoa_

 _p.s. – I used the last of our only other bag of coffee this morning, so by sending you this, you're inadvertently forcing me to leave the house early tomorrow, so I can both mail this, and go by the coffee place in the morning, so I hope you're proud of yourself._

 _p.p.s. – Quistis is invited to the wedding. If you don't want to tell her yet that's fine, but if I have all this time to plan this thing, it's happening as soon as you get home, and she might be surprised to get an invitation on such short notice. But maybe give her the coffee first._

 ** _.Day 24._**

The tears did not stop, once they started. A week later, and whatever block she had found when Squall first left, Rinoa could not stopper. She wrote three more letters. She went to the movie theater and watched an animated movie that should have been funny, but left her sobbing over an animated volcano. She even made it to the bookstore, determined to fill out a job application, but instead left with a book about a man who spontaneously travelled through time, and the wife he continually left behind. She read the book over the course of a day and a half, and by the time she got to the end, was crying so hard she couldn't see the words on the page.

She got out her notebook with the intention of starting another letter, of telling Squall about the book, maybe even of sending it to him, even though she doubted he would be able to do much reading. She would ask him, then. Would he like her to send this book that was about them, if they had met both sooner and later in life? About a love that blazed so brightly it could only end in tragedy?

Instead she thought of the artist in the book, and the way she spent her time alone, and Rinoa remembered an idea she had seen online.

Paper cranes. A tradition out of Esthar, pre-isolationism, that was both pretty, and an idea she was certain Squall would not mind.

Rinoa held the book in both hands and sighed, and then shook her head and admonished it for being so perfect in its heartbreaking beauty. She set it on the coffee table, and walked into their bedroom and pulled a small box out of her closet. When she opened the box she was hit with the smell of her childhood. It contained a few photographs, sheets of pink stationary, a dried rose, and a few pieces of jewelry, but it smelled like sheer curtains blowing beside open windows, like her mother's perfume, and lying in bed while her mom sang her to sleep.

"I'm never going to stop crying," she whispered, and wiped at her eyes with her sleeve. She sniffled, removed the stationary from the box, and replaced the lid and slid it back into the corner of her closet. She'd held onto the stationary for years, afraid of wasting one of the only things she still had of her mother's. Now, she finally had a use for it.

By nightfall, Rinoa had a pile of paper cranes on the floor in front of her; light pink, and faintly scented with her mother's perfume. She stood up, and took a breath. For the first time in a week she was not trying to breathe around her tears, and she smiled at her work, and got ready for bed, and she was okay.

 ** _.Day 25._**

The next day, she was not okay. She woke to a pain that struck deep inside her, and after a fitful day, she greeted an even more fitful night. In the darkness, with Angelo sleeping at her feet, the loneliness that had abated the day before washed over her again, stronger than ever. Rinoa tossed and turned, and eventually made a cup of tea and forced herself to drink it, slowly, with intention, and when she lay back down the panic dulled enough for her to finally fall asleep.

She dreamed again. She was on the same hill she had been the last time she had seen Squall, and was surprised to see the number of comrades around him had grown. There were SeeDs, but there were more people that Rinoa did not recognize, with dark skin and tribal dress. It was morning for him now, and she wondered if she was seeing him in real time. He was walking through the camp, stopping now and then to talk to the people milling around the valley. Occasionally after he stopped a group would move somewhere else, and even at a distance she could tell he was viewed with a high degree of respect. In her dream she felt both pride and envy.

He turned so he was walking parallel to her viewpoint, and Rinoa frowned, and narrowed her eyes. He must have been facing south, as his shadow stretched in her direction—or rather, she was certain, _her_ shadow.

He turned east, so his back was to her, and she could see with more certainty—the shoulders of his shadow sloped too far down, it widened at the hips instead of narrowed. She watched, and wondered why nobody noticed, why anyone speaking to him did not point out that his shadow did not match his frame.

In time he reached the end of the valley closest to where she stood, and stopped to speak to a woman whose dress was distinctly different from the other Native people around her. They spoke for longer than any of the others Squall had stopped for, and Rinoa grew anxious.

 _She knows,_ she thought. _She saw it. She can tell._

The woman appeared to look to the ground and back to Squall several times, and finally to the top of the hill, and Rinoa felt something wrap around her heart when the woman stared in her direction.

And so she screamed. And in the second before she woke up, Rinoa saw her own wings unfold from Squall's back.

She sat up in bed, panting. Angelo, patient and used to her nightmares, nuzzled her feet, and Rinoa reached for the glass of water beside her and drained it.

There were words, when his wings unfurled. Words that clawed at her, and Rinoa blinked in the darkness, trying to remember. _Why do you have my shadow? Why do you have my wings? Why do you—_

She reached under her pillow for Squall's letter and turned on the light, muttering an apology to Angelo, and found the words she was looking for.

 _ **I've felt you with me since I left**_

"Of course," she said out loud, conversations over the last few months coming back to her.

" _Sometimes I feel like when I'm gone part of you comes with me."_

" _I feel like a piece of me is missing."_

" _I'm half of a whole."_

"Of course."

She glanced out the window. In the pre-dawn hour, the waning moon was only just rising. The sky would be moonless in three days time. One month since he left. She felt the flutter of something waking up inside her and moving into the empty spaces. Rinoa looked to the table, to the candle she burned for his protection.

She wasn't just imagining it. Part of her _was_ missing, when he was gone.

And now that she knew that, she was going to try to get it back.

 ** _.Day 28._**

Rinoa went into their room at sundown. She moved Squall's candle to the floor, and beside it lay the remaining materials she would need, and lit a stick of incense along with two other candles.

Then she picked up a small knife, lowered the point into a small container of salt, and began her work.

She spoke softly but confidently, focused all the while on that space inside her she could finally identify, and on the image of her wings on Squall's back. She spoke to the four directions, to the guardians she had come to rely on so strongly this last year and a half, and when she finally felt them beside her, she spoke of Squall. In the candlelit room, she was more and more certain that her dream was more than just a dream, and she said out loud her thoughts, her request, her _need,_ to bring herself, his shadow, back to her.

Her guardians listened. And when she was finished speaking, three things happened at once.

The altar candle, which had burned dutifully for twenty eight days, went out, despite the absolute stillness of the room.

Rinoa jerked back, a white hot pain searing between her shoulders, and drew in a rapid breath, and choked on a silent scream as the room turned to chaos around her.

And on the other side of the world, Squall Leonhart woke with a roar of pain that roused the entire camp, and then collapsed.

* * *

 _First, this is the chapter of many pop-culture references, including the first time I've actually referenced The Time Traveller's Wife in fic, despite that book being such a huge influence over how I view this pairing. If you haven't read it, go to the library/bookstore immediate (or download it), because it is the most amazing book ever. _

_Second, thank you so much to everyone who has left feedback so far! I appreciate every single review more than I can say!_

 _And finally-Happy 5th Anniversary to my husband!_


	6. Chapter 6

Rinoa heard the sea in her dreams.

It crashed against a steady play of voices, of light and dark. Above her the clouds morphed and shifted, shadows on the earth shrinking and growing and circling as the sun moved from one horizon to the other; she watched the moon grow larger, and later each time the sky grew dark.

And then, she woke.

She did not recognize the room she was in. Sheer curtains fluttered against a large window set into walls made of stone, and the sound of the surf stayed with her even into waking. She stretched and turned under the heavy comforter, and gasped when she looked to her right. Squall lay asleep on the bed beside her.

Rinoa blinked several times and touched the covers, her face, his face-and knew, she was not still in a dream. She was awake. She was here. Which meant…

"Squall," she said softly, and brushed her hand from his forehead to his hair. He did not stir, but his skin was warm.

"Hey." She shifted towards him and kissed his cheek, and brought her mouth close to his ear. "I missed you," she whispered.

He remained asleep, but Rinoa did not worry. Instead, she snuggled against him and lay one arm across his chest and took in his warmth, his smell, the sound and feeling of his breath against her forehead.

"I missed you so much."

She lay like that for longer than she could say, until restlessness and curiosity got the better of her. She kissed Squall lightly on the lips, and slid out of the bed and walked to the window. A light breeze blew in along with bright grey light from a sky covered in clouds, and Rinoa looked down. She was wearing the same thin black pants she had worn when she knelt at the altar in her bedroom, the same faded grey t-shirt Squall used to wear when he went for runs until she stole it to use as a night shirt.

 _How much time has passed?_

She turned back to the window. A short distance away, past sand and sea grass, was a stone house, crumbling and old, and beyond that, a lighthouse. She could not see the ocean from the window, but did not need it to know exactly where they were. She frowned.

Hunger hit her then, and Rinoa left the small bedroom with a promise to Squall that she would be back soon.

The house was empty but far from abandoned, and had obviously been recently occupied. The coffee maker in the kitchen was off but the carafe was still half full and the coffee was hot. Rinoa glanced around and opened a couple of cabinets until she found the mugs, and filled a small green one with coffee, took a banana from the kitchen counter, and returned to the bedroom. She sat on the edge of the bed and thought about the last things she could remember.

The new moon. She recalled the smell of incense and the presence of her guardians when they responded to her call, and she remembered the time-lapse of days that followed. Somewhere in that was Squall's voice, and his embrace, as if they had met in that dreamland. She could not bring to mind where, though, or for how long.

"Maybe you'll remember," she said out loud, and slowly ate the rest of the banana.

There were no clocks in the room, and under the cloud cover Rinoa could not track the time by the length of shadows, nor did she did know how long the house would be empty, or exactly who would be returning. She had not been in this house in almost eight months, not since it was first completed. They had been invited, but the timing never seemed to be right. Squall was either gone and she did not want to make the long journey to Centra alone, to be in a place so unfamiliar and so unsettling for her without him there, or he had just returned, and they were unwilling to share those moments when he had just come home.

Eight months ago, the house was mostly empty.

Now, it was filled with love.

In the time they had known each other Rinoa was never sure how to behave around Edea. She was her mother, as much if not more than her own mother had been. If Julia Heartilly had given her life, Edea Kramer gave her a string of them, threads of voices woven together through time. They were so loud at first, but now, a year and a half later, Rinoa hardly noticed them. They were her own thoughts, her own instincts. Maybe it was not that she had gotten used to them, but that she had finally been able to pick out her own voice from so many, past and future, and in doing so could blend the rest into nothing more than a hum in the background. The GFs, she thought, were more intrusive. (And why _shouldn't_ they be? Bonding with a Guardian should be more than connecting a cerebral feed, and she didn't blame them for making their presence so known.)

Around Edea, though, the voices of the succession were louder. Edea spoke to her inside her head and out, waves of deep purple untangling themselves and curling like smoke behind Rinoa's eyes.

She wanted to ask if Edea had seen the same things, but never knew how. She felt a need to be polite, to be demure. Neither role was entirely natural, and she usually just felt uncomfortable as a result; like the few times she met her father's parents, and knew as soon as she crossed the threshold there would be no running and make-believe in their home. Looking around, though, Rinoa could not now say why she felt that way.

The curtains on the window were white, marked with delicate embroidery, and hung from a simple rod positioned at the top of the ceiling. Small, framed watercolors of various types of flowers hung on the wall, and opposite the window sat a modest pine dresser, topped with a translucent grey vase filled with sea grass, and a bowl of shells of various shape and color. Even the bed was plain: a light wooden headboard she remembered helping move, and pale purple sheets underneath a thick white comforter.

It was very… Edea, she thought. Not Edea the Sorceress, her Mother, with her hard edges and magic and a voice that spoke to her through time. But Edea Kramer. A woman who loved deeply and lived lightly, and saw the beauty in all things.

Sitting in the room, listening to the tide through the open window, Rinoa thought, for the first time, that she and Edea may have more in common than magic, than the Succession. And she inhaled deeply, and let out a breath of anxiety she had held since waking.

She took another sip of coffee and looked to Squall, who stirred and shifted against his pillow. Rinoa stood and set the banana peel and coffee mug on the dresser, and returned to the bed and lay down so she faced Squall, intending to study his face, a face she so rarely saw asleep.

Instead, she saw his eyes.

He opened them as she lay down, and she waited for the small moment of panic that should accompany waking up in a new location, but all he did was stare at her, calmly, quietly, and with an intensity that nearly made her blush.

She raised a hand to his face and let her palm rest against his cheek, and he reached up and closed his fingers around her wrist.

"Hi," she whispered.

He held her more tightly, and leaned towards her and kissed her, then dropped her wrist and wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her across the small space between them on the bed, and just-held her.

And she let him, and did not speak.

She tried to think of the last time he had held her like this. The night before he left had been too hurried, too tense, and while they had laid in bed, tangled in silence, it was a silence of desperation, of apology. And yet, right now was just as far removed from the lazy comfort of the weeks between his contracts, in the time they believed the lie of his time away from Garden.

It reminded her, she finally decided, of a night shortly after the war. It was the second, maybe third night they had spent together, and they were still learning where your arms went when falling asleep as close to another human being as was possible. They were in Winhill; over coffee the morning after the return party, Squall had asked if she wanted to go, just the two of them. A week away. No one had to know where they were. After the months of war, the idea of complete anonymity, of making sure they even still _liked_ each other when their lives were not in imminent danger, was not something she even needed time to consider.

Sometime in the early morning on their first day there, she had awoken. It may have been a dream, or a noise outside, or nothing; but she was one minute asleep, and the next wide awake. She had looked at Squall, then, in the dim glow of the early August sun, and, unwilling to be too far from him, had gotten up to use the bathroom and came back to bed with a book, squinting at the words until enough light passed through the windows that she could easily see the page.

She still did not know how long he had watched her, that morning. He didn't know, either. Only that he had woken up in the brief time she was out of bed, and that she _returned,_ and he was too overwhelmed by first the panic that she was gone, and then the intensity of watching her come back and knowing that he would _always_ watch her come back, that he could do nothing but watch her. When she finally noticed he was awake, he had stared at her, hair falling into his eyes, and he had gently taken her book and set it down on the other side of the bed and pulled her into his arms, and Rinoa had never felt more raw, or more wanted, or more whole.

She did not know why they were now here in Edea Kramer's guest bedroom, or how, or how much time had passed. Part of her, she knew, still wondered if this was not a dream, or some in-between world created by her summoning.

But in his arms, she slowly began to relax.

"You knew." Squall spoke first, his voice dry against her.

"I knew?"

"The morning I left. You said we'd see each other, and it would be soon."

"Well…we had to. I just thought…." She trailed off. She didn't know what she thought. She suspected at the time her premonition that morning was born from nothing more than passion and hope. Now… "We just had to," she repeated.

"You did this, didn't you?"

Rinoa turned her head up so she could see his face. His eyes were softer than she expected them to be, and he kissed her forehead.

"I think so," she said. "But I didn't really mean to. I dreamed you… You had my shadow. You-"

She stopped, and they both looked up at the sound of a door opening somewhere else in the house, followed by voices.

"We're in Edea's house," Rinoa said, and Squall nodded.

"I recognize it. I helped build this place, after all."

She smiled. "How long do you think it's been?" she asked. "About a week, if my dreams are right."

"Best just to ask," he said. He turned from her and looked around the room, and slowly sat up. "I wonder how we got here? How have we been asleep for a week, with no means of hydration or nutrition?" He paused, and asked darkly, "What's happening on the other end of Centra?"

They were quiet, and after a few moments Squall excused himself from the room. While he was gone, Rinoa pushed herself off the mattress and walked again to the open window.

He did not ask if they were really here, if this was really happening. Rinoa wondered at that, at his acceptance, or if any doubt was just unspoken. They had met each other in enough dreams and none of them had felt this normal, but there were just so many may questions around it.

"Best just to ask," she echoed.

Squall joined her at the window after he walked back into the room, and slid his arm around her waist and rested his chin against her shoulder, and together they watched the wind move through the grass on the dunes. His hair tickled her ear and she turned towards him, and he kissed her forehead again, and touched his lips to hers, and Rinoa slid her arms around his neck and closed her eyes. The kiss was long and gentle, and hung on her lips long after they finally broke away.

"I've missed you so much," he breathed. "So much."

"I know."

"I worried about you, Rin. Seeing you…" he stopped, and she kissed him again, soft and quick.

 _I know,_ the kiss said. _You don't have to say any more._

He nodded, and their eyes met in agreement that it was time, and they threaded their fingers together and walked away from the window, and through the door into the hall.

Rinoa recognized one of the voices immediately as Edea's, but could not place the second. It was not Cid, as she had expected, but another woman, her voice deep and heavily accented. Rinoa slowed her steps and looked to Squall, and was surprised to see his face relaxed, a smile forming in the corner of his eyes.

"That explains so much," he said under his breath, and stopped walking and looked at her. "You're about to meet someone I think you're really going to like. I hope, at least. I know she'll be happy to finally meet you."

"Who-"

"It will be easier for her to explain. Just…trust me." He squeezed her hand, and Rinoa frowned and furrowed her brow, but followed him nonetheless into the Kramers' kitchen.

And she froze.

Edea sat at the small dining room table with a cup of tea in hand, and seated beside her was the dark skinned woman she'd seen Squall speaking to in her dreams.

 _Trust me,_ she heard Squall say again, and she shivered, and she tried to swallow her apprehension.

Both women smiled at their entrance. Edea set down her tea and stepped forward, first hugging Squall, and then pulled Rinoa into an embrace. "It's good to see you," she whispered. She smelled of roses, and the threads in Rinoa's mind shifted, and began to unravel.

"You too," she said. Their eyes met, but Edea looked quickly away, turning to the dream-woman sitting at the table, as if that was always what she meant to do, and was not simply avoiding Rinoa's gaze.

"This is-" she started, but the dream-woman held up a hand, and stood up slowly. Her eyes were fixed on Rinoa, and for Rinoa's part, she could not have looked away if she had tried. The purple smoke that filled her mind whenever Edea spoke was fading, giving way to another color, a new color. Deep orange, the color of a desert sunset, and it was thick and beautiful.

"Rinoa," the woman said. _Rinoa._ Her named sounded like honey on the lips of this stranger; depth in each syllable pulled from sacred places in the earth. _Ri-nooo-ah._

She said nothing in response, but took a small step forward. The dream woman met her and grasped her arm with both hands, and they looked into each other's eyes.

The orange smoke grew thicker, and she could swear she heard the echo of drums.

 _You are…_ Rinoa felt the words form in her mind, and saw the other woman nod.

 _This is your first time meeting another, isn't it?_

Even in her head the woman's accent was thick, and Rinoa paused, and did not know how to answer. A harsh red line pulsed in the thread of voices, and the woman tightened her grip around her arm.

 _It is okay,_ she said. _There will be time to explain._ She then leaned forward and kissed Rinoa's cheek, the many ornaments in her hair failing against her shoulder. Rinoa shivered, and found she did not want the woman to let her go. _It is okay,_ she repeated.

The woman stepped back, and the smoke thinned. Rinoa blinked, and, without a word, Squall's arm was around her waist and he led her to one of the dining table chairs, and took a seat beside her. He rested one hand against her knee, and she felt him asking if she was okay. She squeezed his hand in response, but looked at him, and was surprised to see that he looked nervous. He had said he hoped Rinoa would like this other woman. Which had to mean…

She gave him the smallest shake of her head, and looked away. The room seemed brighter than it had a few minutes ago, the sounds sharper. Edea handed her a cup of tea which Rinoa accepted, and when they were all seated, the dream-woman spoke again.

"I am Miagaho," she said proudly. "Leader of the Shalmal people of Centra. You may call me Mia. I have been hoping I would meet you, but did not expect it to be so soon."

Rinoa nodded, and sipped her tea, too many questions in her mind to know which one to ask first. The colors in her head swam together, and she looked from Squall, to Edea, and to the woman, Mia, and noted the circle that they formed. Her thoughts drifted back to her last night in Timber, and were snatched away, and she saw that Mia was smiling.

"I'll get there, my sister," Mia said, and Rinoa flushed. She could feel Squall once more at the edge of her mind, trying to reassure her, or, she supposed, to simply _read_ her, and once more, she blocked him out, threading her fingers into his in a physical gesture of togetherness. They had spent a month apart, and now, in the brightness of Edea's kitchen, Rinoa was not sure she had room for anyone else in her brain who was not forced there by the long thread of time.

"Shalmal," Rinoa said instead, recognition dawning. "That's where-"

"Where I've been," Squall said. It was the first time he had spoken since they stepped out of the hall and with his words the smoke in her head cleared almost immediately. "Where _we've_ been. Mia holds the other end of our contract."

"You can thank me later," she said with a dark laugh. "But your lion is keeping my people alive."

"He…" _He does that,_ Rinoa thought, and locked her eyes with Squall's.

 _Now you'll let me in?_ Some of the nervousness in his face was gone, and Rinoa saw that he was amused by her resistance, rather than hurt or annoyed. She allowed a few more seconds before she broke her gaze.

She turned back to Mia. "I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to-"

"Shhh, shhh. I told you, I'll get there. But first, little sister, what do you know of Shalmal?"

"Not much," Rinoa admitted. "I was…unable to join the others when Squall came here during the war, and I… I didn't finish school."

"We are not taught in school anyway," Mia laughed again. "Not properly, at least. And you-your accent is Galbadian. No, school would not have taught you about my people. But what do you _know?"_

Rinoa's eyes darted from Squall to Edea, and Squall nodded. _It's okay._

"Esthar… Esthar is trying to take your land. Since the shields fell and people started to leave, they've been coming south, hoping to start a new society. Esthar's technology, without Esthar's…history." Rinoa spat out the word.

"Which shows how deluded they are," Squall added, with a nod to both Mia and Edea. "And how much escaped Lag-my father's-attention." He shook his head. "He's just…too damn trusting."

"This is not your father's fault, lion," Mia said sharply. "It is just the way of man. Nobody wants Pandora blocking their sun twice in one lifetime. They are people who think life can be better, and think Centra is where they will find that better life. But they want the life they are used to and will not listen to another way of living." She sighed, and Rinoa saw her first glimpse of something vulnerable in Mia's strong appearance. "They are fools. You cannot change, if you are not willing to change. And when they dealt the first blow of death to us…"

Mia looked to Squall, all strength back in her face. "You, lion. You will win this war for me. I did not ask for it, but you will win it with less bloodshed than my people can, and in less time."

Rinoa frowned, and looked at her lap. _You will win this war for me._

So he would be going back.

 _But you did not expect to see him, anyway, did you?_ The words came in a rush of orange smoke, and Rinoa looked to Mia at the sound of her voice in her head. The older woman shook her head and made a _tsk_ -ing sound, but while Rinoa felt her stomach clench with nerves, she did not look away from Mia's long stare.

"Fine," Mia said out loud, and looked now to Edea. "You were right about this love, my friend. They are dangerous."

"Dangerous?" Rinoa asked, and looked between them. Edea smiled at her sadly and looked like she was about to speak, but Mia let out a laugh.

"I thought you taught this girl!"

"There's a lot to learn," Edea said, and took a sip of tea. "She'd had far less time than us, after all."

Mia _tsk_ ed again, and Rinoa felt herself growing annoyed. She was tired of waiting around Mia's cagey answers, Edea's polite silence, and Squall's complete acceptance of everything happening around them, of feeling like she was the only person in the room who didn't know what was going on.

"I _have_ had less time," Rinoa said, and her voice was surprisingly high pitched. "Than _all_ of you. I've spent the last month doing everything I could just to make it through the day and you've been-you've been _bonding,"_ she cried, and turned to Squall. "While I've been missing you so badly I thought on more than one occasion I was actually going to be sick from it, you've been making friends, and that's good, and if you have to be here I want you to make friends, but _Squall!_

"And you," she looked to Edea. "What did she think you taught me? What _have_ you taught me, in the small time we've even spent together? And you, Mia-what do you think she _should_ have taught me? What are-who _are_ you? How did we get down here? What _happened?"_

Rinoa paused, her stomach even tighter and a lump in her throat so large she was having trouble breathing around it. She looked down again, felt the others looking at her, and after a deep breath and several minutes when nobody spoke, she said, very quietly, "And…where's Angelo?"

And she laughed. And the laughter quickly turned to tears, and angry or not, Rinoa leaned towards Squall. His chair made an awful noise as he pushed it out of the way and knelt beside her, and Rinoa wrapped her arms tightly around his neck and tried to stifle her tears against his shoulder. She heard him whispering something to her, felt him brushing the hair from her face. At her outburst the orange and purple smoke in her mind had swelled, and while it did not entirely fade, in his arms it thinned, until at least Rinoa could try and see around it.

"Where's my dog, Squall?" she whispered to him, and he pulled back and looked at her, and wiped a tear from her cheek with his thumb.

"She's with Irvine," Edea said. As if Rinoa had been asking her. As if she was even aware of anyone else in the room.

She felt the hurt of the last month spilling out, _drawn_ out. Every day she spent at home trying not to crumble lay now between her and Squall, the bridge between them repairing itself. _I missed you,_ she told him.

In the background, Edea continued, although she was thousands of miles away. "He was able to come down from Deling City the fastest, until Dr. Kadowaki could get there."

 _I know,_ Squall replied. _I missed you, too. It's awful down here. This war is so different. And…you're not there._

"He agreed to keep her, until you were ready to come home."

 _Squall, I'm so sorry. Whatever happened-I think I caused it. I had a dream and you-_

"That's enough," Mia said, and both Rinoa and Squall turned to her.

"Can you… _hear_ us?" Squall asked, and Rinoa bit back a smile at how indignant he sounded.

"I cannot hear what you are saying, but I can guess. And that is all you can do, for now. You are right, little sister. You deserve answers. I think you know part of what happened because you are the one who did it. But before you can know how, you need to know more about what you are."

"A-"

"A Sorceress, yes. As you are, and she once was, and as I have always been. It is, as I have said, the way of my people. The Shalmal-we are the true descendants of Hyne, and I am in my generation the bearer of his power. But I will save that history for now.

"I saw you dreaming, sister. You know your lion walked with your shadow. What you do not know is why. But-she does." Mia gestured towards Edea. "And now, she is going to tell you her story."

Edea sighed, and stood up. Rinoa watched her pick the teapot from the stove and bring it to the table, watched the amber liquid flow into the four cups on the table. She sat the heavy clay pot onto a glass square on the center of the table, and while she did all this, Squall pulled his chair back into place and took a seat, and Mia swept her eyes around them, closing the circle.

And then, Edea began to speak.

* * *

 _I forgot to say this on my last update, but I created a playlist for this story, posted at my 8tracks account (username: summonerluna). I can't link to it here, but there is a link in my profile._

 _Thank you so, so much to everyone who has left feedback on this so far. I know writers say it all the time, but it really means the world to have that confirmation that someone is reading. 3_


	7. Chapter 7

" _Mommy!"_

 _The child stopped short at the edge of a forest, and looked in the direction she had come from. She could just see smoke rising above a rocky hill, visible only in the way it colored the sky yellow._

" _Mommy!" she cried again, and took a step closer to the woods. She knew she wasn't supposed to go this far on her own, had been told not to explore the forest, but she could_ hear _someone, and it sounded like they were crying. And she had also always been told she should help people, and if someone was crying, didn't that mean they needed help?_

 _She took a few steps back towards the hill, listened for the sound of her parents calling out for her, for anyone looking for her, and heard the sound again._

 _Someone was_ definitely _crying._

 _Five year old Edea Roberge stepped back towards the forest and stood exactly on the edge, half of her feet on the rocky ground of the place they were visiting—Center-a?—and half touching the fallen twigs and branches of the forest floor. A small tree stood beside her at just her height, one of many others that grew in the shadows of the branches that towered overhead. The forest felt different here from the ones at home—like it was older, although that seemed like a weird thought to have about a forest._

 _Edea took in a breath, told herself to be brave, and walked into the shadows._

 _Aside from the crying, the forest was silent. Another way it was different from the woods at home. The woods there were never quiet, always filled with birds singing and squirrels chasing each other from tree to tree. In here though even her footsteps seems to fall more softly, and Edea concentrated on making them as silent as possible. She wanted to call out, but felt like it was wrong to speak in here, just like it was wrong to speak in the temples at home. Instead, she stopped every few paces to listen, and changed her direction until the sobs grew louder and louder—until they abruptly stopped._

 _Edea froze in place, terrified and ashamed by what she had done. She'd gone into the woods, into the place mommy and papa told her never to go, and her head filled with all sorts of terrible reasons why it would be forbidden._

 _She wanted to run, but hadn't thought to mark her path, and wouldn't even know which direction to run to. She thought about calling out, but whoever—or whatever—had been crying had to be near her, and would hear as well, and she didn't even know if sound would make it all the way back to camp. She thought about just laying down, circling up beneath a tree and hoping her parents would come and find her, and that nothing bad got to her first, which led to thoughts of_ what _bad things might get to her first. Her eyes filled with tears and her small body started to shake—_

— _and a voice broke through the silence._

" _You are the missionary's daughter, aren't you?"_

 _Edea did not move. The voice seemed to come from all around her, spoken in a language she did not recognize, but understood nonetheless. She was afraid to answer, but while the voice spoke softly and seemed to be in pain, it had a sense of authority she was more afraid to ignore._

" _Y…yes. Yes ma'am," she said. She felt the words come out of her mouth but heard them in the same foreign tongue as the voice that had addressed her._

 _And then—a sigh, that seemed to come from the forest itself._

" _You should have listened to your mother," the voice said, and it sounded more sad than anything._

" _I know," Edea said, and her tears spilled out freely. "I'm sorry. I want to go back—"_

" _I know, child. But it's too late for that. You can never go back."_

 _The light hit her from all sides, and for a moment Edea saw the body of a woman lying in the forest on the other side of a fallen tree. She had skin darker than anyone Edea had ever seen, and blood covered her robes. Then the image vanished, along with the clearing, and Edea could see nothing but blinding white. She felt tears on her cheeks but could not hear herself crying, could feel her mouth open but no words seemed to come out. And then she felt fire move through her entire body, and a pain so strong it seemed to lift her off the ground. She fought against it, soundless and alone, until, finally, it released her._

 _When she opened her eyes again, she thought it had been a dream. She was back at her parents' camp, her mom sitting beside her bed reading, and Edea tried to sit up—and screamed as soon as she tried to move._

 _._

 _Snow was falling._

 _Edea would remember that, because in three trips to the southern continent since she had joined the humanitarian aid organization, it was the first time she had seen it snow. It floated in the air like ash, and she watched it melt on the rocks that scattered past the base of the lighthouse, slowly staining them darker shades of grey._

 _Cid found her. She knew that he would, and knew she could have found other places to flee—to hide—but also knew the conversation they were about to have was unavoidable. It always had been._

 _She had seen that, long ago. What she still couldn't see was what would follow._

 _She saw him before he saw her, and she watched him searching. He pushed his hair out of his eyes, and she could sense the nervous energy spilling from him into the cold winter air._

 _When he finally did find her he stopped, frozen in the sand, and Edea watched his confidence drain away._

 _This, she thought. This is why she ran. This violation—he told her so often she had a gift, the way that she could read people. And so often she laughed it off, or changed the subject, or just smiled and thanked him for the compliment. But she never could figure out how to explain to him how right he was. He deserved it. And she knew he would accept her, as she was. He wouldn't be down here at the edge of the world, if he could not accept this truth, if he were afraid of her nature._

 _So why was_ she _afraid?_

" _I'm sorry," she said, saving him from having to speak first. She strode towards him, feeling the occasional snowflake smart against her skin._

" _I…" He met her at the base of the rocks, and reached up and scratched the back of his head. "Snow, huh?"_

" _Yeah," she said. "I've never seen it down here before."_

" _Me neither."_

 _He let his arm fall and tucked both hands into his pockets, and for a few moments they stood in silence, their breath white clouds._

" _If you don't want—if you don't feel the same—it's okay, Edea. I don't want you to feel like you owe me an explanation. I don't need to know why. But I meant what I said. And I can't let things end like this."_

" _End?"_

" _Well… I asked you to marry me, and you disappeared. I just assumed—"_

"— _I know. And I'm sorry."_

" _So…not the end?"_

 _She sighed. "…that I don't know. There's nothing… There's been this perfect world in my head ever since our first trip down here, where…where we are together. We get married, and build a house down here and have a family and grow old and are happy."_

" _But?"_

" _But that world…that can_ only _exist in my head, Cid."_

 _He took a few steps closer. "Why do you say that?"_

" _What does marriage mean to you?"_

" _What?"_

" _Before I answer… I just want to know what it means. Because to me it means…beyond all else, it means supporting each other."_

" _Of course it does." He frowned. "I mean—yes, I agree. Supporting each other, loving each other, not being discouraged by the hard times—"_

"— _how hard?"_

 _He blinked at her. "What do you mean?"_

" _I mean…is there a limit? To when you have to walk away?"_

" _Well I guess… No. I mean, there shouldn't be. What would be the reasoning? I love you, but only up to a point? There'd be no reason for anyone to get married, if that were the case."_

" _You mean that? Even if I asked you to?"_

" _Edea—"_

 _She looked at him and shivered, the strong ocean breeze blowing straight through her coat._

" _I hope…I hope you know what you're saying," she said, and raised a hand. She watched the emotions on his face, first interest, then confusion, and then awe, when he saw the snow around them thicken, watched the snowflakes travel, not with the wind, but with the direction she faced her palm. They blew now towards the rocks, now down the coast, and finally in rush of swirls and spirals out over the ocean. The waves grew solid beneath them, sculptures of power and beauty frozen as they raced towards the shore._

 _Cid looked at her, wide-eyed, and Edea waited. He stretched one leg towards the water and slid his foot against the tideline, now a thin sheet of ice over the sand._

" _You're…" he whispered. She did not respond._

 _He took a step, and then another, and knelt down to touch the ice._

" _But this is…saltwater," he finally said, and shook his head. "Not that it should matter, but you…" He stood up. "You're a Sorceress."_

 _Edea nodded, still trying to gauge his reaction. There had been no fear in his words, but there might have been respect. "I am."_

" _That's…it makes so much sense."_

" _What?"_

" _Your gift. That's what the rest of the team calls it. I thought you were just a natural…but I guess you are, just in a more primal sort of way. Not that you need help—I mean, you could be just gifted. You're very talented, I don't mean to imply you need a reason—"_

" _Cid," Edea said, finally relaxing. He looked embarrassed, and she smiled at him._

" _How…how long have you…I don't even know the right way of phrasing it, now that I think about it. I don't really know much about them—about—you?"_

" _Us—well, you—is fine."_

" _I don't really know much about you, other than what we know about the Shalmal. And it's a birthright there, with successors identified before they're even born. I know there are others, of course, but they… I'm sorry, I shouldn't—"_

" _It's part of our history. Part of our present, if you believe what people are saying in Esthar."_

" _Do you?"_

" _Believe a Sorceress is gaining power there? I…" She knew it, of course. Had known, as she knew so much she didn't want to, linked to so many others. "I do. And since I was five."_

" _Five—years old? But Edea, you were…"_

" _Just a child."_

" _But how?"_

" _You mentioned the Shalmal. When you were in training for these assignments, you learned about the missionaries that used to come to Centra?"_

" _Yes. Ridiculous people—who comes to where the world began to try and convert them to—"_

" _My parents."_

 _He looked mollified, and Edea laughed. "I've thought the same thing over the years. They were for a long time, and took me with them on missions after I was born. Until one one trip, when I wandered across a dying Sorceress."_

" _But their tradition—"_

" _It didn't matter. She had a successor planned—but her body was too far gone. As soon as I crossed her path, I was chosen. There are rituals, and customs, where someone chosen can be guaranteed to inherit the succession, but the magic… It only wants to survive. And it won't stay in a dying host, if there's a better alternative nearby. It's part of the reason why…why we are so feared. Beyond the atrocities some have committed through the years, while our bodies can be slain, the succession will always find a way to move on."_

" _Do they know? The Shalmal—"_

" _They do. And they have helped me tremendously. To accept the succession as a child is actually much easier on the host than to accept it as an adult. But Cid—"_

" _No," he said, and stood up a little straighter. "It doesn't—none of this changes anything. You're the same person you were yesterday."_

" _But are you?"_

 _He blinked at her. "What do you mean?"_

 _She did not answer. Instead, she swept her hand towards the sea, and the frozen waves broke free and pounded towards them._

" _Tell me tomorrow, Cid. But think about it—if you've studied the Shalmal, if you know anything at all about the succession—just think about it."_

 _And she left, tears burning her eyes, and thought about how this was twice today she had walked away from him._

 _He would come. And she didn't know if she had it in her to turn him away a third time. But he would come._

 _What she did not anticipate was that he would come that night, not long after midnight._

 _She felt him before she heard anything. She could feel those imbued with magic, or if they had recently been in contact with it, but could not remember getting so strong a sense before from an ordinary person. It should have been unnerving, but it was…almost expected._

 _She opened the door before he could knock. He looked startled, but recovered quickly, and immediately said, "No."_

" _What?"_

" _I'm not the same person," he said. "Because yesterday—the day before yesterday—I thought I wanted a wife. I thought I wanted us to come down here a few more times, or maybe go somewhere else—just spend a few years traveling, changing the world little by little, and then finding a place that made us both happy. But Edea…I want_ you. _I don't care what that means, or what it means I might need to do. I thought if you said no it would be heartbreaking, but if you asked me right now? The idea of going back home without you…it's unbearable."_

 _They stared at each other in the starlight, the winds of Centra blowing harshly across the plains and rattling the hinges on the open door._

 _He meant it. She felt it in his presence, and heard it in his words._

 _She thought of something a Shalmal Elder had told her, on the eve of her teenage years. That in the structure of the tribe, there were many prepared to defend the Sorceress, against outside forces, but most importantly, against herself. That unchecked, source magic could consume. The tribe had roles and rituals in place to ensure that did not happen, but in the rest of the world, no such protection could exist. That in a world where "Sorceress" was one to be feared, to be hated, that Edea would find no communal support—but she may find it in an individual. In her parents—as she had—or even with close friends should she choose to share her secret, but there was another. The idea of Knights had been whispered as long as there had been a Sorceress who existed without the protection of a tribe. A Knight, who could protect her: who could help her grow stronger, would defend her against her enemies, and whom she could rely on to protect her from herself._

 _A Knight._

 _It sounded so antiquated at the time, but the word resonated, and she felt something coming to life inside her; a comfort she did not know she had needed._

" _Come in," she finally said. "It's cold outside."_

 _She extended a hand, the same hand she'd used earlier to shift the air and freeze the waves, and when he clasped it, she could have sworn she saw their hands begin to glow._

 _._

 _The waves echoed in the empty stone walls._

 _The room had been the children's room once. They came and went over the years, some staying just long enough for a distant relative to be tracked down, some who lived there for a year or two before finding a family. And some…_

 _Edea stood still in the doorway and did not bother to fight her tears._

 _It had come down to Squall and Seifer, in the end. After all the others had found families, temporary or not, in the last weeks it had been the two of them. And in the last weeks she realized her failure._

 _She had loved them. Not in the way she loved all the children who spent time under her roof, but truly loved them, truly cried for them, as if she were their mother after all., and not someone there to temporarily fill that roll. Squall, so helpful when he thought no one was watching, all shyness and tears, especially after Ellone left. And Seifer, who needed to be the best, who needed constant praise; who would wake up before the rest of the children and sit quietly with her while she read his favorite book._

 _They all needed families, needed mothers. But those two—she needed them._

 _And now the room where they had stayed, until the very end, was nothing but bare mattresses and bookshelves missing so many torn and battered stories._

 _It was too much._

 _Edea turned and walked into the courtyard, and took a seat on the steps. Had it really been less than a year? It was still hard to be in this place without feeling the flaring in her chest of the older woman who had appeared from somewhere else in time and filled Edea with a magic stronger and darker than that which she had always known. But if the magic of Centra was pure—true source magic, passed directly one by one from Hyne himself, the magic she took in that day was ugly, and painful. And through it, she finally understood the reason why the Sorceress was feared. She feared herself, if she was being honest. There was the potential for horror in her now. And while he left to defend their future, to defend the future of their children, every moment Cid was away, Edea was more and more aware of how strong that potential could become._

" _Take care of our sons," she said to the wind. They were the last words she had said before he left, two sullen faces strapped across from each other in the helicopter that would carry her family away for longer than any of them could tell. She thought of the man that had brought the other Sorceress to her. Squall, her Squall, so many years in the future. She knew it was him, even if she didn't understand how, and wondered: what role did she and Cid play in the path that brought him back to her? Would he be okay? He looked worn and battle-weary, but was he happy?_

 _And was it really their choice to make, stripping him of any chance to grow up with a real family?_

 _She shook her head. The courtyard was no better than the bedroom. Cid had been gone for less than a week, and in his absence she was already feeling parts of herself starting to fray._

 _._

 _The ship was moored by the lighthouse. White sails were gold in front of the setting sun, and the shadow of the hull ran over the rocks on the shore. There was movement on deck, and several of the children waved at her when they saw her standing on the rocks. She waved back, and watched their silhouettes bow and then return to talking, reading, or simply watching the sunset._

 _There were many of them, and she was pleased. When they first sent Ellone to safety, the ship was nearly empty. No more than the small crew of those they felt were trustworthy enough to contract, a couple they'd been friends with in their days of humanitarian-aid who were happy to spend their days at sea, and a few of the older orphans who volunteered, more eager to spend their time at sea than risk a life with a family who wouldn't really want them._

 _And now, they would have her. Now she could be with them again, could talk to the older children, could sit with the young and comfort them through their loss._

 _So they could sit with her, and comfort her through her own loss._

 _She expected to feel hollow._

 _In the months after Cid first left, she felt the weight of their separation deeply. While never without affection, Edea had not seen their marriage as one of great need, at least, for her part. She loved Cid. That was never a question. But she also loved her children, her garden, their home by the sea. And before that, she had loved their work. They had travelled separately on rare occasions, him back to Centra as he loved it so much, her to the mountains in the north, to remote villages where resources were scarce and they relied on the medicine from her team. Edea knew she missed him during those times, that she dreamed about him and often found him in her dreams. But since he left for Garden she often found herself confused, unable to orient herself in his absence. She forgot to eat some days, too busy sitting in the empty house wrapped in her own loneliness, or she would find herself far down the shoreline without a memory of how she got there._

 _That's how the nomads had found her, only weeks ago. And they had looked at her and in a moment they knew_. _In Centra, the presence of magic was not easily concealed, and in Edea there was a foreign magic, pieces of a violent future the true descendants of Hyne found uncomfortable and unwelcome._

 _And still, they shared their secret._

 _And the day before, Edea had held Cid's hands under a moonless sky, and whispered the words taught to her by the nomadic women that would sever the bond between them, and allow her to leave their quiet home so she could once more live a life of caring for others; the only life she knew how to live._

 _She did not feel hollow._

 _There was no empty space where Cid had occupied, no longing for a connection she had grown so dependent on. She missed him, and it had been just as hard to say goodbye when he boarded the small craft that would take him back to Balamb as it had always been—but it had not been_ harder. _She was here. She was aware. She would survive, as she always had, and he would be there as her partner, even if they could not predict when—or if—they would see each other again._

 _That's what it would take for the spell to work, after all._

" _Mama?"_

 _Ellone's small voice drifted to her from the stone steps leading down the beach. Edea smiled down at her, still amazed at how much she had grown in just a couple of years, and how much of an adult she was starting to become. "Elle," she said._

" _I saw you waving. We're leaving soon, right?"_

 _Ellone closed the distance between them and they stood together and watched the ship, and Edea was reminded of the many, many sunsets she watched from here, with Ellone, with all of the children…with Cid._

" _We are. Soon."_

" _I missed seeing Mr. Cid this morning. I didn't know he had to leave so early."_

 _Edea sighed. "I know, sweetie. He wanted to stay and say good morning but he had to go back to Garden."_

" _Seeds and Gardens," Ellone said, and grinned. "I'm happy you're calling it that."_

" _That's what we did here together all the time, right?" Edea asked. "So there's no reason we shouldn't take some of that with us." The future-Squall's voice echoed the terms. She dreamt about that day so often, that if it weren't for the threads of the succession she had inherited Edea would have long ago started to believe the entire incident had only ever been a dream in the first place._

" _Is my brother okay?"_

"… _what?"_

" _My brother. He cried so much the day I left, and Mr. Cid said he was at Garden now. Can't he come with us instead? We need to be together."_

 _(We need to be together.)_

 _Edea felt her throat start to swell, and blinked back tears. "I'm sorry Elle," she said. "He can't come with us. But Cid said he's happy at Garden."_

 _The lie burned, and Edea could not hold Ellone's gaze._

" _That's good," was all Ellone said, her tone flatter than Edea remembered her capable of. "I know Mr. Cid will make sure he has someone to look after him."_

 _Children, she thought, are too intuitive. And Ellone had always shown that more than any of the others. She would not have been surprised if Elle had suspected the truth about her and Cid, that she could sense a change, and understand why he had left during the night, why he couldn't be there to see them off._

" _Ready?" Edea asked, and Ellone nodded._

" _I'm glad you're coming with us," she said. "I miss your stories. Plus no one lets me do anything because they don't want me to get hurt. You're going to make sure they let me play, right?"_

" _I'll make sure of it."_

 _Ellone smiled and led the way down the steps, and they walked together across the beach to the waiting ship. Edea shook hands with the crew and embraced the children, all excited to have her on board. She nodded that it was time for them to go, and joined what she learned had become a nighttime ritual of saying farewell to the sun._

 _The stone house was still in sight well after the children had gone to bed, and Edea stood on deck and watched the shadow of her peninsula home grow smaller on the horizon._

 _(But Edea…we need to be together._

 _Cid had not taken her suggestion lightly, or been willing to accept the solution on how to live through their separation._

" _I can't come with you," she had insisted. "I've known it…since that day. That woman—whoever she was—it's magic we don't know how to deal with, Cid. You have to train them. You have to get him ready. You can't do that if I'm there, and we don't know if some part of me wouldn't try and stop you. The women of—"_

" _To hell with them! They aren't_ us! _They can't tell you in three days what we've come to know in almost 20 years! If you can't come with me now, I'll come home, in a few months, a year at the most—"_

" _We agreed you had to stay there. To help him, to make sure that…whatever he's meant to do that brings him back here happens."_

" _He's a_ child, _Edea. He's barely six years old, and we're deciding the rest of his life for him. I know you're worried about messing with time, but I don't know how much longer I can support this."_

" _It's not just Time, Cid. I_ know. _It's in here," Edea pointed at her head. "And more than just that…these new powers are not what we've spent the last twenty years with. They're stronger, more untamed."_

" _That's even more of a reason I should be with you."_

" _This is my decision, Cid. I love you enough to do this. To walk away, before we turn this idea of the future into something that_ destroys _the future. Even if…"_

" _Even if it destroys us. Even if it means we never see each other again."_

" _You'll be with our sons. And I'll… I'll be with Ellone. We'll have our family. And we can write, can call."_

" _But the spell is broken if we meet. What about_ my _decision? What if I say no?"_

" _I asked you about this, Cid. I asked you, years ago. And you promised, if it came to this, you would do it."_

" _I know. I just… I never thought it would look like this when it happened."_

"… _Me neither." )_

 _I never thought it would look like this._

 _The lighthouse pulsed on the horizon, and Edea watched the thin scar of a moon sink into the sea, and did not sleep for the remainder of the night._

 _._

 _She did not worry until the third time she had the dream._

 _Dreaming had always been there, after all, even before. Since she was a child, she had dreamt the deaths of her sisters, a moon that cried monsters, the world set ablaze by magic. She carried the memories of time in her veins, and had gotten used to seeing it in her sleep._

 _And so, the first time, she thought it was only a dream. She was back in her seaside home, and it was in ruins. The bodies of her children, clad in white uniforms, littered the shore, and several enormous chains rose out of the sea towards a shadow floating in the sky._

 _In the dream she wept, and looked for an escape she could not find. She woke, sweating and afraid, and had never made it more than a few yards from the house._

 _The second time came months later. This time she approached one of the chains, cutting through the icy black of the ocean until it rose to her knees, weighing her dress and threatening her balance with every roll of the tide. If she could not escape this landscape she would at least learn more about what loomed overhead, but as soon as she touched the chain she cut her hand. Her blood was the same black as the sea, and she reached up, only to cut herself again. She tried and tried, waded further out to another chain, and then another, until she was swimming, desperate now to find some way up, some way out, and she did not wake until she was numb from the water save for the burning pain in her hands, and, too weak to swim back to shore, began to sink._

 _She managed to climb up the chains in the third dream, and collapsed at the gates of a grand and towering castle, shrouded in darkness._

 _And when she woke this time, she was afraid._

 _The fear stayed with her into the coming weeks, although the dream did not come again. She thought of telling someone, but who would she tell? Her and Cid's friends, who had helped when they first sent Ellone to the ship and stayed with her for so many years, had departed only months earlier, and most of the crew were now the orphans, grown, who had chosen to stay on board, rather than make lives for themselves on one of the continents. She thought of writing to the Shalmal, asking for guidance. The southern shore was only a few days away if the weather held, and none of the children would ask her why. She even thought of May Kadowaki, who had been such a figure of strength as she navigated an ancient power in a modern world for so many years._

 _In the end, however, she wrote to Cid. They had never stopped writing over the years, and while the spell had held and she never felt herself collapsing into the weakened state as when he first left for Balamb, she missed him terribly, and he missed her as well. He would worry, she knew, if she told him what she feared. Worry, and probably want to see her, and no small part of her didn't wonder if that wasn't the right thing to do._

 _The chains. The castle. The cloud of shadow that surrounded it. For years the consciousness of the future sorceress had lain dormant in her mind, indistinguishable from all the others, and now, Edea felt her waking up, and she had no doubts the woman was connected in some way to the castle, to her dreams. And she could not help but ask—was she prepared to ride this out alone?_

 _Her compromise, was to tell him where she would be. The children—not even Ellone—would not question dropping her off at the old house for a few days, and he could reach her there, if he needed to. And a week later, she waved from the rocks of the lighthouse, and walked, for the first time in over ten years, into the ruins of the home where she had once built a life. There was a musty smell, from years of stagnation under dust and damp rocks, and moss spread in from the broken windows. Edea felt like she was intruding, that she was bringing something dark into a hallowed place._

 _She moved through the rooms like a shadow, stopping in the old bedroom she had shared with Cid. She had taken most of their few belongings on the ship with her, but the old mattress still lay, weathered and moth-eaten, beneath a cracked and peeling headboard. She lay down on it and closed her eyes, trying to remember, and there, she dreamed again._

 _The castle loomed in front of her, and the doors started to open when she was not halfway up the giant stone staircase. She took the last steps slowly, feeling her skin start to tingle, and stopped at the top of the landing and watched as the woman—the Sorceress—she had seen in her own courtyard all those years ago strode out to meet her—_

"—That's _enough!"_

Rinoa heard something break when she stood from the table but did not stop, could not stop, and tore through the kitchen to the back door of the house, her vision swimming madly with images of another woman's past, all of the love and all of the pain that Edea had experienced wrapping around her heart and threatening to crush it. She heard a scraping sound and footsteps behind her, but ran and ran, and did not stop until she was pressing into the ocean, and the weight of the sea caught her around her legs and tried to knock her down.

She felt arms around her and thrashed against them, fighting the embrace, fighting the suffocating feeling of Ultimecia reaching out and grasping at the threads inside of her.

"No," she said, over and over again. "I won't let you back in."

 _Rinoa,_ someone was saying. The voice was familiar, as were the arms that reached for her and the smell they carried, but still she fought, desperate to get as far away from Edea and everything she had just seen as possible. She broke free and ran further down the beach, tripping over the edge of the tide, until her skirt wrapped around her ankles and brought her to the ground, where she fell to her knees, dry-heaving into the sand.

 _Squall,_ she thought, and he was there. In seconds he was beside her, pulling her into his lap and running fingers through her hair, whispering to her, holding her, and as she slowed down and the world of Edea's past faded, she felt his fear.

"Hey," he said, and wrapped his arms around her. "I'm here. I'm here."

His breath was warm against her ear and Rinoa drew in several breaths, quick at first, and then slower and deeper, and finally she looked up at him.

"You're here," she said, and it hit her, truly hit her, for the first time since waking up in Edea's guest room however many hours before, that they were _together._ She allowed a moment of looking into his eyes, feeling returning to the numb places left behind when he went to Centra, before she wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him, suddenly and fiercely. She ran her hands through his hair, across his shoulders and down his back, sliding them under the hem of his shirt and onto his bare skin.

"Rinoa," he whispered, and she kissed him harder, and for a moment his hands moved across her as well, one under the thin, damp fabric of her shirt, one against her back pulling her closer against him, and then—

"Rinoa," he said again, and brought both hands to her shoulders and held her gently back.

She said nothing, but looked away. She ached for him, in ways she could not begin to describe, and for the grounding force he was always able to provide.

"I'm floating away, Squall," she said, and he drew her in and kissed her forehead. "I'm floating away," she repeated.

"No you're not," he said. "Not while I'm here. But I want to know what happened."

"I saw it," she said, and when he did not respond, added, "All of it. Her memories—I didn't just hear them in there. I saw them. I _lived_ them. Every emotion. Every feeling of happiness or self-doubt. And then at the end—"

"…Her possession. You felt your own."

She nodded. "I can feel her. She's in my skin, and I just…Please," she whispered, and grazed her lips against his once more. "Help me get rid of that feeling."

"I would love to, Rin." HIs voice was thick, and she felt his fingers tighten against her shoulders. "As much as you want me to, believe me. But will it really help?"

"It usually does," she said, and traced the edge of his ear with one of her fingers so that he closed his eyes and leaned into her just so before taking her hand and holding it between them.

"I just mean…" He paused. "We have to talk about this. If not now, then later. Can't we get part of that out of the way? We haven't seen each other in a month, and I don't want… I want to enjoy _you._ " She shivered at the way he said 'you,' then he added, "Not just avoid something that's going to come up anyway," and she turned away again, and let her head rest against his chest.

The world was almost back to normal around them, and it was quieter than Rinoa felt like it needed to be. The waves were rough and the wind was strong, but after the explosion of sound and color from before, the subtle palette of the sea and then constant beating of the tide were soothing, profane. She stretched her legs and shifted so she was sitting on the sand, leaning against Squall rather than sitting in his lap, and stared out at the horizon. The tide was receding, but the water still nipped occasionally at their ankles. It was cold, and wonderful.

"Do you know what she was suggesting?" she finally asked.

"Mia? Or Edea?"

"Edea. Her story. Her separation wth Cid."

"They used a spell. So they could be—"

"—So they could be apart. So she wouldn't lose herself while he was away."

She looked up at Squall, and he frowned. "You think they're suggesting we do that as well?"

"I don't… I don't know. Mia said we needed to understand _what_ I am. To understand why…why in my dreams you had my shadow."

"You think they are trying to tell us it's related to the separation?"

She nodded. "But Squall, do you know how we even got here? At Edea's, I mean. What do you remember, from before we woke up?"

"I remember…camp. I remember dreaming about you. You were trying to tell me something in the dream. But no… I don't remember anything else. Nothing that would have led to this."

"I do," she said, and she told him what she had done. The connection she had made, placing together pieces of their experiences. The ritual she had performed. And as she spoke, Edea's memories moved through her again, fitting into the missing gaps of her story, and Rinoa brought a hand to her mouth in horrified realization.

"I did it," she said. "That's… That's what Edea was telling us. _Why_ she was telling us. It's what I almost did."

"What? Severed—"

"—our bond. Severed _us._ Squall, what's the first rule of magic?"

"Intent—"

"Intent. But of course, severing the bond isn't what I meant to do. I just wanted… I just wanted myself back. I wanted back whatever you had taken with you, to make the separation more bearable. But it's the same… Squall, what did I almost do?"

Tears burned in her eyes, and Squall cupped a hand to her cheek and turned her head to face him. He looked exhausted, and she noticed, for the first time, a fresh mark on his jaw that looked like it was from a burn. She reached up and touched it and furrowed her brows, and he leaned down and kissed her, gently.

"It's war," was all he said.

"Yeah," she scoffed. "You've got that right. And I almost—"

"—but you didn't—"

"—Don't," she said. "I know it doesn't matter now. But Squall—I won't do that. I won't do what they did. Even if it meant I could go back home and work, or see my friends… I'll _know._ I don't… I can't see how anyone would make that choice. Whether you…whether you take part of me with you or not."

"And you're sure that's what it is?"

"Doesn't it feel that way, to you? You said yourself, sometimes it feels like part of me comes with you." He was quiet, and she continued. "And Edea—that's what it was. That's _why_ it was. Why it didn't affect her, until after Ultimecia. She wasn't dangerous before, when it was magic she could control. But it started following Cid when they were away, once that danger was there."

"But what's the benefit, though? Wouldn't that make her—you— _more_ dangerous?"

Rinoa shook her head. "I don't know. But I don't care. Edea was possessed, when she went…bad. She didn't just do those things on her own. But maybe that's where the danger lies? Obviously I reached that point, and in far less time. I thought it was separation from you, but really it was just separation from…from myself."

"Mia said _we_ were dangerous."

"I know," Rinoa bit her lip, and traced a few shapeless lines in the sand. "What would Ultimecia have done with Edea, if Cid had been there?"

"She wouldn't have needed Seifer," Squall scoffed, and Rinoa nudged him a little harder than was necessary.

"Be nice."

"I just mean—if Edea had someone standing beside her, ready to protect her already—would she have needed her own Knight?"

"You really think Cid could have done that? He kind of fell apart when everything was happening."

Squall paused, choosing his next words. "Maybe," he finally said. "I keep thinking of what _I_ would do, but Cid and I are…nothing alike." He grimaced, and Rinoa almost laughed.

"That's an understatement."

"But he also had all of Garden at his disposal. How ironic would that have been? If they started the Gardens because I told Edea SeeD would defeat the Sorceress, only to have SeeD end up as her army?"

"That's a scary thought," Rinoa said darkly, and for a moment saw herself, clad in flowing silk with her hair streaming behind her, and Squall standing at the front of an army that marched before her. She shivered, and, as though he knew what she were picturing, he drew her closer towards him.

"But _that_ could be the benefit. If you were to turn and you were alone, versus if I were beside you."

"I made you promise to kill me if that ever happens. Regardless."

He raised an eyebrow, and smiled half a smile. "I believe I told you it would never come to that, _not_ that I would do it."

She sighed. "I still couldn't do what they did, though. You are what _stops_ the madness. I couldn't go back home knowing you aren't coming back. We're not…we're not them. My possession is behind us. Without my powers I'm reduced to a sobbing mess, but with them… Squall, it terrifies me."

"That won't happen," he said.

"But why do you think they told us, then? If not as a suggestion?"

"Because it's an option," he said. "And because of what you tried to do. But we just tell them we won't."

"And if they don't listen?"

"Then they don't listen. But Mia needs me. And maybe you could learn something from her."

"So you're saying…"

He nodded, his eyes cold and certain, and leaned he head against her when he spoke. "I want you with me," he said, and she arched her back against the shivers triggered by his breath against her neck. "I have to get back, but I'm not going back without you."

* * *

 _When I say the holiday season at work is insane, I'm not kidding-almost three months since the last update! Two more months until the baby is due, so depending on when my maternity leave starts I may have a little more time before I'm back to the days of typing everything one-handed while sitting up at 4 in the morning..._

 _Thanks to everyone still reading this, especially after the long, long break between chapters. *hugs*_


	8. Chapter 8

The horizon was endless, stretched over the Central desert. As they rode during the day the sky was the color of bright nickel, the air cool and their movement shadowless, but the clouds had broken while they ate, and following dinner, the western edge of the world curved, a bright orange line fading into purple, and finally into the deep blue above them.

Rinoa walked towards it, and stopped at a small cluster of rocks not far from their camp and sat down. She pulled her jacket tighter around her arms in the night air, grateful for the warmth the rock still held from the day. It would be even colder tonight than it was last night, and tomorrow…

She drew in a breath, and focused on the mountains far in the distance, already shrouded by the darkness of the northern sky. They would be there before sunset tomorrow, and she would be back in a world she had never wanted to return to. But the mountains also broke the endlessness of the desert, and she felt comforted by them, by their interruption to the dry, rocky stretch of land that mirrored the spray of stars overhead.

She felt Squall approaching long before she heard him, and leaned against him when he finally reached her and took a seat beside her on her rock.

"There," he said, and pointed up. "Between the line of three stars and that cluster that looks like a face."

"I know," she said, but smiled regardless. "But thank you."

"You're okay?"

"As okay as is possible, with 200 pounds of bird making it impossible to walk after a full day of traveling."

Squall rested his hand against her leg and wiggled his fingers over her inner thigh, and Rinoa laughed and batted him away. "That hurts!"

"Sorry," he said. "You know it's not my favorite method of transportation either, but there's not many options down here. Mia knows you aren't used to it, she didn't mean to upset you."

"I bet she sent you out here to say that just so I would appreciate that you are playing mediator." Rinoa leaned against him and looked at his face, dark in the deepening twilight, and he shrugged.

"No," he said. "Though she did say you would probably say something like that."

"You two seem to understand each other very well."

"I guess so. I still get the impression I'm a source of entertainment for her most of the time, though."

"You have that effect on people."

"Yeah, but it's different with her. She's not laughing at me for missing a social cue or giving a straight answer when one wasn't necessary. She's…"

"She gets you. You're not used to that."

"I am from you."

"Yeah, but you expect it from me. Or at least, now you do."

He smiled into her hair. "True. I guess she does remind me a little of you at first. You always seemed to be laughing at me too."

"Well, I usually was." She laughed, and he smiled back at her. She thought of the last few nights, since first waking up beside him in Edea's guest room, and her chest tightened at the thought of how that was going to change. Their time at Edea's had been too short. She knew Squall and Mia were needed, knew that staying back, even with Edea, would not help either of them, but returning to a landscape of guns, paramagic, and Garden would not answer the many questions she still had, or give her and Squall the time to process everything they had learned.

"Edea seems sad," she said, when Squall did not continue their conversation. He looked down, and exhaled deeply.

"That stands out to me for some reason," he said. "I don't know why. It's not like I would really remember her from when I was little even if my memories had remained in tact. But it seems fitting."

"Because of Ellone, do you think?"

"I guess. She told us she was happy, though, the years she had the orphanage."

"I wonder…"

The moon sank lower, growing in size the closer it got to the edge of sky, more and more stars coming out of hiding as the sky grew ever darker. Rinoa thought of Edea, of her story, and she reached up and grasped at her necklace.

There was more to Edea's story that she had shared, but Rinoa felt it in her memories. She felt the emptiness of a woman who had longed so deeply for one thing, for something granted so easily to so many, that she had been denied when she was just a child herself.

"You wonder?" Squall asked, and Rinoa dropped the rings and looked at him, and took a breath.

"Do you want kids?"

"…What?" He tensed under her hand but Rinoa left it there, and spoke carefully.

"Just a question, Squall. Or at least… A conversation."

"I—"

"Edea did. More than anything."

"She told you?"

"She didn't need to. I felt it in her memories. The sadness she felt when you and Seifer left for Garden, and the orphanage was empty. The reason they had the orphanage in the first place. She spent a long time thinking she would be an exception before she finally accepted her reality. I think…she would have been a really good mom. She would have been like my mom, if she hadn't…"

Squall wrapped his arms around her, and she felt his discomfort, tucked away beneath a need to provide her comfort. She moved her hand from his leg to around his back, a silent _thank you_ for allowing her to spring this on him when even she hadn't seen the conversation coming.

"So what you're really asking is if I'm okay with not having any?" he asked.

She nodded. "I should have known, I guess. But it's just not something I've thought a lot about. It seemed so far into the future."

"What makes you so certain? Have you asked Mia?"

"I can. But I don't need to. It's… There are roles. There are women who bear children, and there are women who bear magic. They aren't….they aren't supposed to be the same."

"Are…are _you_ okay with it?"

"I asked you first."

"Heh. Yes you did." He paused, but she felt his muscles relax as he thought, and when he spoke again it was honest. "I…want to say yes. I guess I'm like you. It seemed so far into the future, and SeeDs don't really have long life expectancies. Before you I can say what my answer would have been. And since you, I haven't given it a lot of thought. Nothing about us is anything I expected for myself. Is that a good enough answer?"

"I guess it is."

"But what about you, Rin?"

She sighed. "I would have said no. No, I never wanted kids. Certainly not any time soon. There are…other things I wanted. I wanted Timber. I wanted independence for so long, for my friends, for myself. And what role model have I had? I think about my mother every day, and would never… I would never, ever want someone to go through what I lost when she died. And even after meeting you…even if I _could,_ why would I risk bringing someone into this world of ours? Not the _world_ world, but…our world. Our world of magic and wars, of the hopelessness I feel when you are gone, of the passion we have when we are together. But I guess…it's sad to know it isn't a choice. That if I _did_ want a child, the decision was made for me."

"So…"

"I don't know. I don't know if now is even the time to think about it. But I keep thinking about Edea, and her sadness, and how she's alone in this house by the sea…" she paused. "Was it right, for me to come?"

"Would it have been right for you to stay?"

"I don't know. With Edea…she could have answered some of our questions. It's not like I would have been alone, like in Timber. She learned how to function without Cid, maybe she could have—"

"—she functioned without Cid because they ripped themselves away from each other. I don't want that. You said that you didn't want that."

"Well I _don't,_ but I mean before that, before Ultimecia. Edea didn't know why the change occurred, just like we didn't know what was happening. But with both of us knowing more now, there could be another way. It just feels wrong to leave her, especially when we were there such a short time and under such strange circumstances. And I'm… I'm scared, Squall." She spoke her last words almost as a whisper, and blinked back tears.

"Scared? Of—"

"Of tomorrow. Of what's waiting for me. I'm not ready to go back into a war zone."

"Rinoa…"

"What should I even expect, when we get there tomorrow?"

Squall paused for a long time, and Rinoa eventually looked away, her neck hurting from angling up towards him. The stars were ever brighter, and yards behind them the fire burned, occasional flares as Mia poked at it. Rinoa could not see her, but felt her, an imprint of magic moving back and forth. Mia would wait up for them, but not much longer.

"It's not like…our war," he said slowly. "I would say it's far more organized, but I'm not sure war is ever really organized. But Mia's people are not trying to conquer, they are trying to protect. And they don't fight the way we do, or even the way the Galbadians do. Before, we were fighting soldiers, so we fought like soldiers. When we were fighting other mercs, we fought like mercs. Down here, we fight according to their rules. I know you won't _like_ it, but it may be easier for you than before. There's more respect to their fighting style—Mia does not abide by killing someone unless you're willing to say a prayer—or whatever version of a prayer you happen to believe—for the family they're leaving behind. She knows there are people on the other side of the mountain. And the mountain—all of it—we keep the collateral damage to a minimum. I know how much it bothered you, what was destroyed, before."

"We still live with proof of that," Rinoa said, picturing the streets of Timber, so full of their own war stories.

"And even the soldiers from Esthar, they're different," Squall continued. "It feels like a stalemate at times, or has so far. It's going to break soon, though. They're on the other side of the mountain, and neither side has been willing to cross the barrier en masse. If they don't soon, I'm going to."

"Squall…"

"I didn't leave you in Timber so I could sit here and play cards with Quistis for days on end, you know. I came down here to fight a war. They know that. Mia knows that. It's why she did what no Centra tribe has ever done before, and hired outsiders to come help."

"Do you think she knew?"

"Knew…"

"About you. That the Commander of SeeD is Knighted to a Sorceress?"

Squall frowned. "I don't see how she could. Hardly anyone at Garden even knows that. Or do you think Edea told her?"

"Edea couldn't have. They're on opposite ends of Centra, aren't they? They know one another, but I got the impression this was the first time in awhile they'd seen each other. But there's a connection between us. I can feel it, you know that. But Mia knows so much more than I do, and once I inherited my powers she would have known there was a change. I just…wonder how much she could read from that. How much she could _hear_ …."

"What?"

"I could…visualize Edea's story so easily. Everything she said was just right there, I felt like I was inside of it. Like you've described before, when Ellone sent you into the past? I imagine it's similar to that. I just wonder, is it possible for bits and pieces of our lives to show themselves to each other?"

"Ah," Squall said, and raised an eyebrow at her. "Having you in my head isn't enough… Now I've got women I've never met hearing me think."

"And seeing you naked," she smiled, and he rolled his eyes. "All jokes aside, I just wonder."

"I don't," Squall said. "For one, you've never mentioned seeing or hearing anything other than the others directly linked to the succession. And what would be the reason for it? Even if she did know who, or rather, _what_ I am, she would also know who I was leaving behind, and that doesn't really line up with how I've come to know her, or anything we've seen from her over the last couple of days. No, I think she was just like you. She recognized her own inadequacies and made the decision to sacrifice certain ideologies in favor of securing the right aid for her people."

"Apparently that attitude makes for a good Sorceress."

"Or I'm just rogue enough not to count."

"You maverick." Rinoa grinned, and Squall leaned down and kissed her. "This is why we're so feared, you know."

"Because you sacrifice values for power and I'm willing to break a few rules?"

"Squall!" Rinoa laughed, but sobered quickly. "Well…yeah."

"You didn't sacrifice values for power, Rin. You made a tough decision when nobody else was willing to take any action."

"And lost a lot of friends as a result."

 _That you would have lost anyway,_ she heard him say, as he said every other time they had this conversation over the last year. "and yeah, yeah, only now they're alive to talk about it," she added, before he could speak. "So don't even bother."

"Fair enough."

She shivered, a breeze blowing through the thin white sweater she wore over the dress Edea had given her upon their parting, and Squall ran his hands up and down her arms to warm her.

"We should head back," he said. "Early start in the morning."

"I guess…"

Rinoa looked back towards the horizon. The moon was now an orange grin low in the sky, and the stars winked at them, depthless in their number.

Squall threaded his fingers through hers and they walked hand in hand back to camp. Mia grinned at them over the dying fire as they approached, and Rinoa saw the color of her magic mixing with the red and orange coals.

"I thought I was going to have to leave you out there," she said, and _tsked_ under her breath, but her eyes sparkled with the reflection of the embers. Under the sun, she was the woman who had stood beside the ocean and commanded a presence that made Rinoa feel like a child in spite of her own powers, and she was the woman who rode with her back straight and her chin high across the relentless desert. But under the starlight and beside the flickering coals she was more fae than powerful Sorceress. Just as dangerous, but with a sense of mischief that both set Rinoa's nerves on edge, and made her fears about the day ahead seem foolish.

"Come on, child. You are helping tonight. You'll need to know this soon enough." Mia grabbed Rinoa by the arm, breaking her from her thoughts, and she dropped Squall's hand and had to hop to miss being dragged into the fire.

"Hey!" she cried out.

"You are fireproof, are you not?"

"Not _literally,_ " Rinoa said, but started laughing in spite of herself. "Unless you want to teach me that as well."

"Not unless you borrow from the monsters again. And we have no need for that. Not like they do." Mia nodded towards Squall, her accent thicker than ever, and her words conjured images of the Guardians. Rinoa was brought back to her last night in Timber and the powers she spoke to, before Mia squeezed her arm. "Now," she said. "What did I teach you?"

Rinoa looked closely at her and Mia nodded. Rinoa stood and closed her eyes, and murmured the words Mia had given her the night before. Words she could not remember by daylight, but that came to her now as naturally as breathing. She dropped Mia's hand and moved in a circle around their camp, crossing one leg over the other and feeling, more than watching, her path. Blue smoke formed, first as a line in the sand that followed her as she walked, then rose slowly, creating a thick dome around them that blazed for a moment when the circle was complete, before it faded, leaving only the quiet desert and the infinite stars above them.

She turned. Mia did not laugh, her grin replaced with a small smile, and she opened her arms and beckoned Rinoa towards her.

"Come here," she said, and Rinoa stepped forward. "Come." Mia placed her hands on Rinoa's shoulders and leaned in and kissed her forehead. The glint was still in her eyes, but the mischief was gone, replaced by the fullness of her power. "That is Centra magic you just did."

"Was it…right?" Rinoa felt small beside her. Her hands tingled, but she forced herself to hold them steady.

"We will sleep safely tonight. Go on, both of you. With magic like that, we don't need a watch."

Mia released her shoulders and Rinoa tried to catch her eyes a final time, but she had either turned too far from the fire, or, Rinoa suspected, had closed herself off for the night. After a few seconds she felt Squall's arm around her waist. "Come on," he whispered, and led her towards their tent. They changed quickly and silently into clothing warm enough for the night, and lay pressed together underneath a thick blanket, another parting gift from Edea.

She said nothing for a long time, focused instead on the glass-shard sounds of the dying fire, of the smell of sweat and woodsmoke in Squall's hair, how her feet felt just slightly lower than her head no matter how flat the ground appeared when they set up camp. She took several slow, measured breaths, and finally clenched and unclenched her fists, and tried to untangle the threads of magic running through her, threads she had not known even existed separately until a few days ago.

Squall held her. He did not move at first, only lay with his arm around her as comfortably as was possible on the hard ground, but in time slid his hands across her, following with his fingers the path she formed in her mind as she traced the magic in her veins. The threads of Edea and Adel, of the war, the power she had come to know, slowed in their movement, matching pace with the new flow of magic she knew now came from Centra, until they moved in unison. Wherever she brought her thoughts, Squall brought his hand, until she visualized a ball of light moving underneath his palm, in synch with her consciousness, fusing the threads together. He stopped with his hand at the base of her neck and she gasped, her entire body filled momentarily with heat, and then she exhaled, and lay spent in his arms.

She shivered, and he pulled her closer, his fingers now running through her hair, no light, no magic underneath them, only the familiar comfort of his embrace. She thought briefly of home, of the footprints scorched into the carpet by the front door, but Squall spoke before she could formalize her thoughts.

"What was that earlier?" he asked, his voice a low whisper.

"The dome?"

"I guess? I couldn't see anything. Just you walking a circle around us, and Mia obviously proud of you."

"It's the barrier spell. She's done it every night—it's what—"

"Keeps us hidden. I know what it does. But she looked like she was watching something."

"You…couldn't see anything?"

"No. But I felt it. Just like I felt the change in you, just now." He moved his hand back to her neck and for a moment she felt the same light pulse, once, twice, and then he moved his hand and it was gone. "That's…"

"Centra magic," Rinoa said. "That's what Mia called it. Magic from her people…magic from…" She shivered, unable to speak the name of her creator, so close to the original source of her power. "I wonder why you couldn't see it. It was…the smoke. The colors of—"

"Of the succession."

"They're so much stronger, being around Edea, and Mia. But this time I saw my own. Blue smoke that formed a dome around us. I wonder why you couldn't see it?"

"I don't know." Squall's voice was thicker and thicker with the pull of sleep, and Rinoa closed her eyes. She felt him kiss her forehead and tilted her head up until their lips met, and brought her head down to rest against his shoulder.

They lay quiet for a long time, the only sounds the occasional pop of a coal and the wind rustling the edges of the tent. The image of blue smoke covering them stayed stronger and stronger in Rinoa's mind, until she felt like it was in the tent with them, and she jerked up, blinking into the darkness of the tent.

"What—?!" Squall sat up, his arms around her before she had finished orienting herself.

"Nothing," she said, and let him lower her back to the ground. "Nothing."

"Not nothing."

"Nothing…right now."

"Mmm." He stroked her hair, but she heard his breathing slow once again.

"Squall?"

"Mmm?"

"I think she's training me." Rinoa's voice was a whisper so low she could barely hear herself.

"For?"

"What if she did know about you, but didn't want _you?_ "

"Want me where?"

"Here. You said it wouldn't make sense for her to bring you away from me. Unless…"

He shifted. "Unless…she wanted you out here."

Rinoa shivered again and Squall pulled her closer, and they let his words hang between them until long after they were both asleep.

* * *

 _Happy birthday Rinoa!_

 _Sorry for the short-ish chapter. There were a few other things I wanted to do, but mostly I just wanted these two to have a chance to interact since it's been a few chapters since that's really been able to happen._

 _I'm also officially on maternity leave now, so hopefully I'll get another update up before the new baby is born, since updates will probably slow down a bit right afterwards._


	9. Chapter 9

_Rinoa walks on the shore of an unfamiliar stretch of the sea, placing one foot in front of the other, following the weaving line drawn by the receding tide. She digs small stones out of the smooth sand with her feet, stopping only when she can feel one that is perfectly round. They are blue and purple, red and orange and black —the colors of the succession. The colors of magic. When she has collected too many to hold she casts one, two, all of them into the air, lets them hover in front of her and form a circle that rotates slowly around her. She continues walking, adding to her collection, and they start to turn faster, faster, until they are a blur of all colors, a white circle, a clock face with her at the center._

 _She carries Time with her._

 _In the distance there is the figure of a man, and Rinoa pauses, looks to the waves, up the shore where the sand gives way to rocks and then to forest, and finally up to the sky. She will discard her gown of Time, but she is not sure where._

 _In the distance, the man waits._

.

Mia did not mention her magic, or her test the night before during their ride the next day. The cloud cover that had broken yesterday did not return, and under the unrelenting desert sun, she, Mia, and Squall rode out the day in relative silence. Rinoa could not say, however, how much of that was due to the heat, and how much was anticipation over what awaited them in Shalmal. Even the chocobos, all duty and obedience before, seemed uneasy the further east they went.

They stopped only twice. Once for lunch, and a final time at the foot of the Talle Mountains, a couple of hours before sundown. Mia, their leader, slowed to a stop and looked back at Squall and Rinoa, and announced that they would rest before continuing the final stage of their journey. Rinoa felt a change in both Mia and Squall, and she paused before dismounting, turning instead to Squall and studying him.

Chocobos were no longer birds of war, as they had been once upon a time. She had never even seen one in person until they went to Winhill on their quest to stop Ultimecia, much less seen anyone riding one. In spite of their noble history they were now farm animals, or left exclusively to the wild. Rinoa found them beautiful, but hated riding them, and would not be sorry to see their journey come to an end. But as she looked at Squall, his back straight and jaw locked as he stared at the narrow pass through he mountains that would take them into the SeeD camp, Rinoa felt like she was looking into history, and she shivered. Squall turned towards her, and Rinoa held his gaze.

"Something's wrong," he said. The shiver stayed inside her, lingering until Mia walked up to them and extended a hand to help Rinoa down.

"I know," Mia said. "I have felt it for several miles."

"They'll have scouts." Squall frowned, his brow furrowed. He swung to the ground and walked to where Mia and Rinoa stood, and unlatched the canteen from Rinoa's chocobo. "Esthar knows we're gone. They'll believe our troops are more vulnerable without us." _We were gone too long._ Rinoa did not need to hear him say it to feel the words hanging between them.

 _I didn't ask you to come for me,_ she wanted to retort, but wasn't even sure if it was true. Didn't she? She wanted the missing pieces of herself back, but she failed to specify to the Guardians how she wanted that to happen.

 _Intent,_ she thought, remembering her conversation with Squall on the beach, just a few nights ago. She didn't want to sever their bond, but she wanted herself back. The magic, the Guardians, carried out exactly what she had requested. And even at the time, if she had been asked—wasn't being reunited with Squall what she would have asked for, if she had thought it was possible? Not to pull the parts that made her _her_ back to Timber while he stayed so far away, but to be together. In Timber, in Centra—the Guardians could have dropped them back into the outer reaches of space as long as they had each other. The feelings that ran through her with seeing Edea's memories faded more and more every day, and if Rinoa could not have understood their decision at the time of Edea's story, she certainly couldn't now.

She turned back to Squall and Mia, still discussing what may be happening on the other side of the mountain, and she saw something pass between them she could not read, some dialogue of war she never wanted to understand. _You're back in a war,_ she told herself, the reality of it dawning for the first time since they set out from Edea's. She was back in a war, only this time, it was not _her_ war. She did not seek out soldiers, had not taken up arms. This time, she came into it accidentally, with an advantage neither her comrades nor her adversaries could claim. And she came into it not wanting to fight.

 _Not again._

Mia and Squall stopped talking, and Rinoa looked between them. "I'm sorry, I…"

"You are afraid," Mia said softly. For a moment her pride held on, and Rinoa felt the words of denial on her tongue, but she could not bring herself to say them. She _was_ afraid. Of war, but more than that, of what would happen to her if she walked into a war. What would happen to everyone else.

"It's okay if you are, Rin." Squall reached for her hand. "This isn't your world." He gave her fingers a small squeeze and Rinoa fought the urge to smile at what she understood to be a subtle hint that they had suspicions about Mia's motives.

She squeezed back, and holding her head a little higher she looked at Mia. "Do you know what's going on?" she asked. "What…what we're going to be walking into?"

Now Mia frowned. Rinoa saw her eyes flicker to her and Squall's linked hands, and then dart up to look at Squall. "What do you think, Lion?"

"I told you last night neither side was willing to make the first move?" he said, addressing Rinoa. "Someone made a move."

"Esthar?"

His lips moved into a thin line, and Rinoa frowned. "Xu wouldn't—"

"She might," he said. "This was her mission well before they brought me out here. If she thought it was time, she's within her rank to make that call. Especially if I wasn't there."

"They why call you down here at all?" Rinoa asked. "You said they needed you as a strategist. If Xu gets to determine when to take action, you could have stayed at—"

"Rinoa."

She closed her mouth and looked up at him, struck again by how differently he carried himself, so close to a battlefield. When they fought together before, he was too nervous, too guarded to stand so tall. A year and a half later and he was confident and comfortable. She had seen it in her dreams after he left, but her dreams were a thin imitation of what she saw in front of her. She shivered again, felt a numbness that started at the base of her spine and coursed through her like lightning. It left her shaky and pale for a moment, two, and when feeling started returning to her it was with a strength that scared her.

"I…"

"Come with me, Rinoa," Mia beckoned before she could finished her thought, and Rinoa fought the urge to reach her hand to Squall's face. He looked at her with all the intensity of their last night together in Timber, and she took a small step towards him, eyes locked with his—

"Rinoa!" Mia called again. Ree-noah. Her name was thick on Mia's tongue, and too urgent to ignore. She turned from Squall abruptly and followed Mia, some distance past the chocobos, where Mia was lowering herself to the ground. Rinoa watched her take a small bag from a pocket inside her robes, and empty its contents into her open palm.

"Yes ma'am?"

"Sit."

Rinoa looked behind her once, to where Squall still watching them, before taking a seat beside a small collection of round stones. Rinoa brushed them out of the way, and Mia handed her a small fruit.

"We grow this here," she said. " _Uchnuda._ Fruit of the Source in your tongue. Very common for us to eat in times of great stress."

"… _Us_ , us?" Rinoa asked, and turned the fruit over in her hand. It looked like a plum, but was as firm as an apple.

" _Us,_ us," Mia confirmed. She stretched her arms into the space between them palm up, with the fruit resting in the space where her hands met, and waited, until Rinoa realized she was supposed to do the same. She held out her hands, closed her eyes, and Mia began to speak in a language Rinoa did not recognize, but did not need to in order to understand.

 _A call for clarity,_ she thought. Around her outstretched hands she felt the air grow warm and then cold, and the threads of magic inside her started to tingle. Mia fell on a word and repeated it, twice, a third time, and when Rinoa opened her eyes after the chanting stopped, she saw the remains of blue and orange smoke floating up from the space between them.

Mia took a bite, and gestured to Rinoa that she do the same. "We eat it in unpredictable times," she began to explain, although Rinoa had not asked. "It will have no effect on anyone else, save for a bitter taste. It is easy, Ree-noah, for the Source to seek an answer for itself. Most times, we should listen to that wisdom. But we are still human, and we still fear, and fear clouds the judgement of all. Even our magic."

Mia took another bite, and Rinoa stole a glance back at Squall, who looked now to the mountains, before bringing the fruit to her lips. To her surprise it was sweet, and the flesh inside melted on her tongue. She swallowed, and looked back to Mia. "You said it would be bitt—"

"Bitter to anyone else. Not to us."

Rinoa took another larger bite, and chewed slowly, thoughtfully. All the money Esthar spent on Odine's research over the years, that Garden spent on containment measures, and here was a fruit that did it for them? She pictured Odine learning this, and the temper tantrum he would throw, if he believed it at all, and wondered why _she_ even believed it. Because Mia told her so?

Squall approached them before she could think too hard about why. He walked near enough to realize he may be interrupting something and then paused. He took a long drink from his canteen and Rinoa watched him wipe the beads of water from his mouth. He looked down at her and she held her gaze until he furrowed his brow. "What?" He glanced between her and Mia, and wiped his mouth again, as if to make sure he didn't have anything on his face.

"Nothing," she said with a smile. He continued to look confused, and she laughed, and held up the last piece of fruit. "Taste this."

He frowned, and then shrugged and took a small bite and grimaced. "Rinoa that tastes like it's poisonous. Where did you find it?"

"She didn't," Mia said, and Rinoa held back a giggle when Squall snapped back to his normal, straight-backed posture.

"I'm sorry—"

"Don't be. But you believe me now?"

"I didn't doubt you," Rinoa said. "But—"

"He is part of you. But he is not part of the Source. You both would be wise to remember that."

Mia looked past them at the mountains and said something to Squall about their path that Rinoa wanted to listen to, but found she couldn't hear over the echo of what was obviously a warning.

 _Of course he isn't part of the Source,_ she thought. When had they ever acted like he was?

But she didn't need to answer the question, too many times when they behaved as one coming immediately to mind. Space. Time. Every one of his trips away from her. But that was them. That was love. Rinoa frowned, thinking again to Edea's memories.

 _Unchecked, source magic could consume. The tribe had roles and rituals in place to ensure that did not happen, but in the rest of the world, no such protection could exist._

 _Knights._

How much did Mia really know of Knights?

She pulled her thoughts back to the desert, to Squall and Mia and their discussion of what they might find on the other side of the pass.

"Well?" she asked, and they turned to her. "What are we walking into?"

"Whatever happened was recent," Squall said. "Quistis or Xu would have made contact with me if it wasn't, as long as they were free to do so. And if they weren't… Mia would have felt anything that severe."

"That's…interesting timing."

"We think that as well." Mia pressed her hands into the ground on either side of her and and closed her eyes. They were still seated across from each other, and Rinoa felt magic pooling around her, could almost see veins of light in the sand underneath them as Mia called secrets from beneath the surface. "What can you feel?" she asked, her voice almost a whisper.

Rinoa looked at Squall, and he frowned, both of them remembering the night before. Was this another test?

 _Go ahead,_ he mouthed, and took her hand. _I'm right here._

Rinoa closed her eyes as well, and thought through what it was Mia wanted of her.

 _Camp,_ she thought, and pulled up images of her dreams. A valley, with tents clustered together on one end and SeeDs scattered throughout. She thought of Quistis, of Xu, of all the others she had met, and tried to find someone to latch onto. Someone she could read, if only to tell if there was fear, exhilaration, boredom even, but she came up empty. This was not her world, and Mia knew that. She could dream of Squall, because it was _Squall._ She did not dream of war, would prefer not to even think about it, and fought to keep her thoughts from wandering to two years ago, when she cowered under a train platform in Timber wrestling with the decision to write to Seifer, to SeeD, to do anything so she wouldn't have to fall asleep to the sound of gunfire, or to the long months that followed.

She cracked open her eyes, and Mia sat exactly as she had, head bowed, hands down, trying to read the earth just as she asked of Rinoa. The ground was still warm beneath them where lines of magic pulsed, and Squall still stood beside her, as patient as ever while he watched this exchange of power they both still struggled to understand.

The pulsing slowed, and Mia lifted her head. She met Rinoa's eyes and Rinoa immediately felt ashamed. For assuming this was nothing more than a test, and for failing it whether it was or wasn't.

"I'm sorry," she said, and her voice sounded small and weak. "I—"

"You will learn," was all Mia said. "Go. Get ready—we will be leaving shortly." She stood up and brushed off her robes, and Rinoa watched her walk a few steps away before turning her attention back to the space Mia had just occupied, and to Squall.

"She—"

"I don't think—"

She couldn't even laugh, as she usually did when they spoke on top of each other, and Squall knelt beside her and brushed one of his hands through her hair. Rinoa leaned into his touch, some charge coming back to her where his skin brushed against hers, and with it Mia's words echoed in her head.

 _He is not part of the source._

 _No,_ she thought, and turned to face Squall fully and kissed him, fast and hard. _But I am. And he is part of me._

She pulled back from him just slightly with her eyes still closed, and reached for his hand, and brought it to the hot sand, his fingers wound tightly in hers. This time she did not think about her comrades, or of war at all. She felt first for the ground beneath her, remembering something Zone had said to her once. _You are not pressing down on the earth. It is pushing up on you._ Try as she might she never could feel the sensation that he described, but she reached for it now and it came easily. The ground was alive, as much as she was if not more, and it pressed into her, kept her from sinking below the surface of rock and sand. Rinoa allowed that energy into her body, allowed it to move through her, through Squall, and finally flow into the ground, and at once they were connected to it. She traced the lines of magic, and in her mind she watched them move out, fanning into the mountains, and she followed them to the other side where she felt the movement of hundreds of other bodies.

They were not afraid. They were not running. The ground pressed upwards against them and they did not notice, but in spite of the stillness, Rinoa felt something dark and angry. Her mind was far away from her now, but she pushed it, pushed it, and finally found the source; near the foot of the Esthar-side of the mountains, the ground was drenched in blood. It soaked deeply into the flow of magic she was now tied to, and Rinoa felt pain. Pain from the earth, from those whose blood had shed, and from herself.

Miles away her body winced, shook, and slumped over.

" _Rinoa,"_ she heard. _"Rinoa!"_

 _I'm coming._

She let the current of magic carry her back to her body, and when she opened her eyes Squall was holding her, pushing the hair out of her face. There was a hardness behind the concern in his eyes, and his hair stuck to a thin sheen of sweat that lined his jaw.

"Squall," she breathed. She grabbed his hair kissed him again, just as fiercely as before. She hurt, in a way she could not describe, and felt some part of her still beneath the surface of the earth. He brought her back. He always brought her back, and Rinoa would have surrendered herself to him entirely if he had not pulled away after a moment, allowing a silence that reminded her of where they were.

"Not here," he said. More of his hair clung to his face, and Rinoa reached up and pushed it back, and shook her head and blinked. The world was dull, after her journey underground, and when Squall extended a hand to help her to her feet Rinoa accepted it with reluctance.

And then, she saw Mia.

"I…" The words died on her lips. Mia was not smiling, and Rinoa shrunk under the intensity of her stare. She could not say how long they looked at each other, only that Mia was searching her, reading her, or at least trying to. But Rinoa fought it, as she had not yet tried to do in the days since their meeting, although if asked later she could not have said why. Because of the fear she had voiced to Squall the night before? But it was a stretch, they both knew. And Mia should be— _was_ —a mentor. Indignation over her comment about Squall?

Maybe.

But she held her ground, and Mia finally relented, and abruptly stated, "We must go."

Squall walked her back to her chocobo and bent down and picked up the small backpack Rinoa carried, containing little more than a shawl for the heat and what remained of her share of the food Edea had sent with them.

"Are you going to tell me what that was?" he asked quietly.

"Not now," she said, and nodded towards Mia, who was busy draping her robes over her chocobo.

"Hmm."

"Don't be mad. I just…need to think about a few things before I can find the words."

"That sounds familiar."

Now she took Squall's hand and flipped her leg so she straddled her bird, and she smiled sadly down at him. "I—"

"Rinoa!"

She snapped her attention to Mia, and Squall squeezed her hand a final time before climbing onto his own chocobo and readying the reins. "Ma'am?"

"Are we going into a battlefield?"

"I don't…" she paused. Mia knew. Of course she knew. There was no reason to lie, and every reason to hope she may still be able to help, to teach. "I don't think so," Rinoa finally answered. "Something happened. Someone was hurt. But I don't think it was one of…of ours."

"Did you hear that, Lion?"

"What does that mean?" Squall asked, and looked between the two of them.

"It means they sent a scout, who will not be coming home."

"That's all?"

"Is that all, child?"

Rinoa looked at Mia and sat up straighter at her challenge, and spoke clearly when she answered. "No," she said. "It wasn't just one scout. There were multiple people injured. But I couldn't tell whose side they were on. But," she turned to Squall. "Things are calm. At least for the moment."

He nodded, and after another long stare, Mia's face finally broke into the proud smile she had given Rinoa the night before. "She is not wrong. We are going to meet our friends. We'll be there before dark."

And with that, she flicked the reins she held and headed towards the split in the mountainside.

A safe distance behind—if there was such a thing—Rinoa looked to Squall and said in a low voice, "I don't believe her."

"About our camp?"

"No. About us. About you. She said you're part of me but not part of the Source. But they're…they're the same thing. I can't connect to it without you, and you carry it with you when you're gone."

"That doesn't mean I'm part of it, though."

"But you aren't separate, either."

"What was that thing you were eating?"

"An _uchnuda_. Mia said it grows here. That it helps us stay in control in high stress situations. She had one too."

"It tasted awful."

"To me it was…" she struggled to find the right word. "Ambrosia. It was amazing, Squall. I wanted to share it with you, but…"

 _But Mia's right._

"But?"

"But you're not a Sorceress."

Squall said nothing. He kept his pace with her until they reached the trailhead, and fell into step behind her. The mountains quickly eclipsed the sun, and on the dark path Rinoa's thoughts were free to wander as they pleased. She felt the pain she had taken from the earth wax and wane, pulsing with the rhythms of magic beneath thought of what it would be like when they arrived, and how the Garden team would react to her presence. Did they know? Of course Squall was still in touch with Xu, and Mia would not leave her people in the dark. Would they be worried? Relieved? Would she be expected to fight?

She thought of Edea's story, of what Rinoa learned through her on the origin of Knights. Could Mia be wrong? The Shalmal were the original descendants of Hyne. There was more knowledge of the Source, of her power in their history than Rinoa could ever hope to learn anywhere else. Mia was a mentor, or had the potential to be. Even if she brought Rinoa down here for war— _especially_ if she brought Rinoa down here for war—she was an ally. Rinoa trusted her, but she couldn't shake her earlier warning.

 _You would do well to remember that._

But how much did Mia know about Knights? About magic diluted through the years as it passed further and further from its origins?

She turned back to Squall periodically. Even in shadow he was imposing, and halfway over the mountain Rinoa finally remembered what he reminded her of, sitting so proudly. A book she'd had when she was small, one her mother had read to her, that she had hidden in the back of her closet after the funeral and only flipped through on the rare times she found it while she was cleaning.

A Knight, to be sure, but not a good one. The illustration was of a man riding a chocobo down a trail, while the little fox in the story hid in the thick underbrush. Rinoa struggled to remember why the fox was scared of him—he was only drawn on one page, wasn't he? Did the text say anything? Was he even referred to as a Knight?

She couldn't remember. But she could see the picture as clearly as she could see Squall riding behind her. The image in the book was meant to be frightening, for both the fox and the readers. And Squall was fearsome, to many. But not to her. When she looked at him Rinoa saw only her protector, and she knew that whatever awaited her on the other side of the mountain, it was nothing as long as he stood behind her.

And what did it say that she saw love, saw safety, in a form that was meant to strike fear into all others?

* * *

 _I think this is the longest I've ever gone between updates on a full-length story, and I apologize for that. Despite being on maternity leave since my last update, the end of pregnancy did not allow for much of anything, and getting anything done with a newborn is next to impossible. I've spoken a little more about the details of all of this on my tumblr (summonerluna over there as well), but now, two months after the baby was born, I am finally at a point where I am finding a little bit of time to write. I will be honest, however-a lot of the health issues I had during pregnancy are still a factor, and updates are probably going to continue to be slow for a little while. I've debated placing this on an official hiatus so I can work at my own pace, and have semi-regular updates once I feel I'm able to go back to it, but considering how much trouble I have holding myself to deadlines, by not being on hiatus I can at least guilt myself into working on it until I'm able to reform the habit of writing (mostly) every day._

 _So, a big huge thank you to everyone who is reading this, and especially those who have left feedback on it! I don't normally talk about the direction stories are going in author's notes, but I will say this is at somewhat of a turning point-the story is, after all, intended to be about Squall and Rinoa, and the Sorceress/Knight bond, NOT about a war or a new conflict that affects people on a wider level. That's a backdrop, but isn't really what the story is meant to be about, and I want to get it back to the relationship aspect and less focused on developing an OC, or on "what's happening in Centra?"_

 _Last note-There's another Successor challenge this year! Visit thesuccessorchallenge on tumblr to learn more!_


	10. Chapter 10

The clouds returned during the night. Dawn broke slowly, and Rinoa was only briefly aware of Squall leaving sometime when the sky was still a dim grey. She knew he kissed her good morning, and heard him shuffling around her in the tent that was too small to realistically house two people, and then she fell back to sleep.

When she woke again, hours later and disoriented, she fought the urge to cry out. She was in a tent, but she was alone. For the briefest moments she wondered if the last week had not been a dream, and then wondered if she wasn't _still_ in a dream, and finally sleep slid from her enough to remember—she was in Centra, in the Talle Valley, in a Garden-issue tent that Squall had called home since he left Timber over a month ago. And now that she was here, Squall was—or at least, should be—somewhere nearby.

She dressed slowly, delaying her entry into this strange world as long as she could. When they finally arrived the night before it was right at sunset. It was fall in the southern part of the world and days were increasingly shorter, but despite the early evening hour Rinoa felt like they may as well have arrived at midnight. They were greeted by Quistis and two women from Mia's tribe, and after giving her a long, measured look, Quistis smiled, and reached out to embrace her.

 _"I would say it's good to see you, but under the circumstances—"_

 _"—It's good to see you, Quistis."_

Quistis had smiled again, and after a hurried meal under the curious eyes of SeeD and Shalmal alike, Rinoa spent the better part of the evening huddled alone in Squall's tent with a flashlight, reading, and trying to forget about where she was. She fell asleep before Squall returned, the exhaustion from their trip across Centra catching up to her, and now she was awake again, and had no idea what the day might bring.

The valley looked exactly as she had dreamt; tents in neat little rows, a few temporary structures built from the materials on hand and what little Garden could supply. Rinoa clutched the book she had borrowed from Quistis before she turned in the night before, and looked around her. She felt Squall's hand suddenly on her shoulder before she had a chance to start walking.

"I'm sorry," he said, and led her towards the largest of the rough structures. "I didn't know it was going to take so long last night—"

"It's okay," she said. "I was tired."

He looked at her, and she smiled up at him. _Really. It's okay._

And it was. She had been given relief, in her mind—relief from having to speak to anyone, from having to face the scrutiny of the SeeDs who would wonder why she was there. Of course they would make the connection, that Squall left—or rather, was taken—and when he returned it was with her, and in the intervening time would have formed their own opinions about what had happened, all of them equally creative, and all of them equally wrong. And she felt relieved from having to take in any more information than she already had. The pain she had felt when she traced the lines of source magic through the mountains and back flared up on their arrival and had yet to subside, and she was certain she had dreamed about a river of darkness that took off from the mountains and tried to wash away the sky. She was curious, oh she was curious, but she could not have handled it last night. She told Squall this, and he nodded, and ran his thumb over the back of her hand.

"I don't want you here," he said, and caught himself and shook his head. "That came out wrong."

"A little," Rinoa laughed. "Since if that's the case, you've really been sending me mixed messages."

An attempt at a smile. Rinoa started to lean in, but looked around them instead. "Am I even allowed to kiss you here?"

"I disappeared for over a week to bring you here. I don't think I have a lot to hide from anyone at this point."

This time Rinoa did not laugh, but she did finish leaning towards him, and kissed him lightly. "Thank you," she said. "I don't think I've actually said that yet."

"We've been busy," Squall replied, and led her the rest of the way into the structure. They were alone, and Rinoa found herself looking at what she knew was their command station. "This is…what I've been doing. I'm not going to even try to explain, and I know you aren't that interested anyway. But I want you to see it, since…"

Her chest tightened, and Rinoa looked sharply up at him. "You're sending me away?"

"Oh—no, Rin. Not…not entirely, at least."

"What does that mean?"

"I don't want you in a war. For one, we both know you don't want to be here. And you shouldn't be. But mostly… I can't have you here. I need to be able to think clearly, and we both know I can't do that if you're around. Dammit," he shook his head again. "I keep—"

"I know what you mean, Squall."

"You're just…a distraction. I know you don't need me to keep you safe, but if I'm constantly looking over my shoulder to make sure you're okay—"

"I get it. So where am I going?" She couldn't even pretend she wasn't relieved. They both knew she could hold her own, that save for Mia, Rinoa was the least vulnerable of everyone in this part of the world, but if that was the excuse he wanted to use for keeping her out of combat, she would take it and run. Sometimes, she smiled to herself, her reputation as a wilting flower worked to her advantage.

"Not far. Don't worry—it's half an hour south by chocobo, and you'll be with Mia's people. If I can, I can even still come to you some nights, and even if I can't, I can try and send someone there to let you know. No more waiting, Rin. It's…it's the best I could do."

"It's…" She thought of her days in Timber, of the month she spent waiting just to hear that he had made it down there safely, and fought against the tears welling up in her eyes. "Thank you," she said again, and leaned into him. He wrapped his arms around her and Rinoa closed her eyes.

The moment was quickly broken, and Rinoa glanced past Squall's shoulder at the sound of footsteps approaching the door. Quistis walked in, and gave them a look far friendlier than the one she had worn the night before.

"Did you finish it yet?" she asked, and took a seat on a table near where Squall and Rinoa were standing. She looked tired and not at all at ease, but Rinoa no longer got the impression it was due to her.

"I fell asleep," she laughed. "Not because the book wasn't interesting. I guess three days under the desert sun is just more than I can handle."

Quistis stared at her for a second before Squall broke his silence with a muffled laugh, and she smiled.

Once, on the way to the Tomb of the Unknown King, Rinoa had made the mistake of asking if they could stop and take a break, and Squall had lit into her, threatening, amongst other things, to send her back to Deling City alone if she wasn't able to keep up with the group. Quistis was the only person who had witnessed this exchange, who knew how cruel Rinoa had been in her response, although they had not mentioned it since. They had not mentioned Squall to each other very often in general, letting a friendship form instead based on book recommendations and independent movies. Still, nearly two years after the first time she set foot in Garden, Rinoa could not understand how in a place with a library as vast as the one in Garden, the friends she had made there made such little time to read, and she was happy to accept trade in film recommendations if it gave her a friend she could share her love of reading with. At the beginning, maybe they should have discussed Squall. But they didn't, and after this much time, there no longer seemed to be the need.

 _I wonder if she knows?_ In their time since reuniting, they had not mentioned their engagement once. Back in Timber it felt…normal. A next step. That's what you do, when you live in Timber. Even at the height of the Galbadian occupation, Rinoa could remember the joy of seeing friends fall in love and pledge their lives together.

Centra, was not Timber. She had fallen asleep in an urban townhouse, and woken up in a fairy tale.

 _But fairy tales_ do _end with weddings. With happily ever afters,_ she thought. _So a quest, then._ And hadn't she read more books than she could count, where even the greatest of love had to be hidden until the world was safe again?

But Quistis answered the question for her. "Congratulations," she said, gesturing between her friends, and she looked like she meant it. "Though I wouldn't recommend trying to make any wedding plans down here."

"I'll keep that in mind," Rinoa said, and, turning to Squall, "Unless that's the real reason I'm here? To get out of a big wedding?"

"You got me," he said. They laughed, but Rinoa could tell the laugh did not reach either Squall or Quistis' eyes.

 _Down here may be the only chance we get._

She wondered if the others were thinking the same thing?

"You can keep the book," Quistis said. Always count on Quistis to know when to change the subject. "I have a couple of others that you've already read, but you can take those, too, if you like. I don't get much time to read these days."

"Thanks," Rinoa said. "Are you…are you okay? I know it's none of my business, that I'm not even supposed to be here, but…whatever happened recently. Are you—"

"I'm fine," Quistis cut her off, and flashed a look to Squall that Rinoa could not read. "Esthar took the bigger hit. Since we pushed them back to the other side of the mountain a couple months ago they've been hesitant to try again, and as Xu would put it, all we did was remind them of why."

"So no one on…" she looked to Squall, and faltered.

"Our side?" he said, with a tight smile. Squall hated the idea of sides. He said he was a mercenary, and couldn't afford to take sides. Rinoa said it was because he was a good person. What they didn't say, was that he had already chosen his side, and everything else was relative unless ( _until,_ she always corrected him) that became an issue.

Quistis shook her head. "Not seriously, at least. We knew they'd be making another attempt soon even before Squall and Mia left. As soon as they were gone everyone was on high alert, and it paid off. Cheatham's got his arm in a sling and Rowan will be heading back to Balamb on the next supply ship, but no casualties. Esthar can't say the same."

Rinoa felt a twinge inside of her despite the fact that Quistis delivered the information so casually. Or, she suspected, _because_ she delivered it so casually. She was overcome again with the sensation that this was not her world, and even if it meant leaving Squall again, she was already anxious to be gone.

They stayed together in the command center for probably another half an hour, talking, not of war, but of Timber, of shallow plans for when they returned home. Quistis was as surprised that Selphie and Irvine had decided to give things another shot as she had been when Squall told her they had broken up, and they even got Squall to admit that he wished that Zell had been available to come down with them, even if they understood that his mother's illness came first, and no one was willing to pull him off of leave.

Then it was time for Quistis to lead a drill exercise, and then, it was time for Rinoa to leave.

Mia arrived to see her off, and Squall made an excuse to step away when Mia approached them to say her goodbyes.

"You are strong," Mia told her, and Rinoa cast her eyes to the ground. "It is nothing to be ashamed of. You are strong on your own, and believe you are stronger with him. But you know Ms. Edea's story, Rinoa."

"She lost herself with Cid, though," Rinoa said. "You want me to be strong on my own—"

"You misunderstand. He helps you. He heals you. That is the role of a Knight. But you need to find your magic without him. He cannot be there for you, if he is a part of it. That is…" Mia looked southward, the direction of her home, the direction Rinoa would be riding. "That is the difference, in the magic of our Creator, and in the magic that has been passed to you. Source Magic was a gift, Rinoa. In the northern parts of the world you are taught it was a trick, but my people know better. You have too many memories of destruction connected to you, and you are afraid."

"Is that…" Rinoa hesitated. She looked to Squall, who watched the valley intently, using every chance he had to fill the in the gaps of everything that happened in the time he was gone. She thought of the things they had discussed on the ride across Centra, and of the story that Edea had told. And then, she took the plunge. "Is that why you brought me down here?" she asked. "So you could… So I could learn from you?"

For the first time since their meeting, Mia looked genuinely surprised. Rinoa wanted to look away, at her feet, at the road she was about to take, anywhere but the confusion buried in Mia's knit brows, but she held her gaze. _Tell me,_ she thought. _Why am I here?_ _Why did my fiancé have to leave the life he is trying to build? Why were we separated, if not by your design?_

But Mia did not answer those questions. Instead she shook her head, the confusion now replaced with apology, and something almost like sorrow.

"I am sorry, Rinoa. I can predict many things about people. I can sense loyalty and honor, and when I should be afraid. This nonsense with Esthar has been building, ever since your Lion's father agreed to drop their walls. He is a good man, but good men cannot control the actions of bad men, and it speaks to him that the bad men of his world chose to take their hatred and violence to new soil, rather than leave their fight in the city. You know how long they have been here, and how long we have held them on the other side of the mountains, but you do not know how bad it can become, how bad it _will_ become. My war is becoming a war of offense. Do you not think I waited, to tell them I wanted Squall? That I did not know the risk of bringing him down here? He is a Knight, Rinoa. His presence has been tied to yours since the day you became a Sorceress. I have sensed other women of the north who have inherited our succession, since my initiation as a child. I have learned of you from my own precursors. Your bond is strong, perhaps the strongest in recent history. Do you not think I asked myself, was it worth the risk? That calling him, may also mean calling you?"

Rinoa stared at her, dumbly, and grabbed at the reins of her chocobo to steady herself.

"You do not belong here, my sister. You have come of age in a time when Sorceress is something to be feared, and it should have been a long time before you learned control, if you learned it at all. I knew the risk. But I must put my people first. And if doing that, meant risking you, I made a promise that I would prepare you."

"So that… That is the training."

"It is not training, Rinoa I do not want you here. But here you are. And you are not as much a threat to me as Esthar is. So I will teach you what I can, if you are willing to learn. And part of what I must teach, is that _you_ are the Sorceress."

Mia pulled out the same pouch she had the day before, and let three of the same small fruits fall into her palm. "These are mine, for I need them too. When you meet my sisters, they will show you how to find them. Some may be wary at first, for you are from the North. But they will welcome you, and they will keep you safe, if you let them. And I urge you to let them."

Rinoa nodded, and stood there, unsure of what else she was supposed to do. Mia looked her up and down, and then reached her hands out and took Rinoa's in her own.

"Just remember, Rinoa. You are strong."

"But he… How can I _be_ strong, if the strong part of me goes with him?"

"You were strong before you were a Sorceress, or you wouldn't be one now. Find that, and you will find your answer."

Mia leaned forward and kissed each of Rinoa's cheeks, and then she was gone. Squall walked over slowly, concern written into his features.

"What did she say?" he asked.

"I asked her," Rinoa said. "If she wanted you here to get to me. I didn't mean to, but typical me, it just kind of came out."

"…and?"

"She says she didn't. Says that she only wants to keep her people safe, and she was willing to take the risk of me being here when she hired SeeD. More or less."

"The…risk of you? Do you believe her?"

"…I don't know."

"Hmm."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing. Just a sound."

"Hmm," she echoed, and he looked like he might smile. "I guess that answers the question about whether she knew you were a Knight. I wonder why she never mentioned it. You talked a lot, didn't you? In my dream, and since we've been around her, you two have just seemed to...comfortable."

"We did," Squall said. "But mostly about what was going on around us—despite what it looks like right now, there hasn't been a lot of time for personal conversation."

Rinoa felt her cheeks flush. "I didn't mean—"

"I know you didn't. It's a natural question to ask. But going into detail would have been taking us both away from the reason we are here."

Several yards away they heard someone call out Squall's name, and both turned to see Quistis. Squall nodded at her and she walked away, and he turned back to Rinoa. "I…need to go."

"Again," Rinoa said, and choked on the word. Squall cupped his hand on her chin and she looked at him, and her vision blurred as she fought back tears. "I'm sorry. It's not your fault, and I know I don't want to be here…but we just had this time, and I guess I thought…" _What?_

"I told you. I'll come out when I can. And try to send word when I can't."

"Squall…"

She leaned into him and buried her face in his chest. Their last parting was rushed and intense, like they were holding onto each other for life. Then, they didn't know when they would see each other again, and Rinoa felt everything she might not get to say coursing through her. Now, their parting was quiet, and instead of leaving her feeling empty, an overwhelming sadness took up space inside of her, weighing her down and making it hard to even stand beside him. He rested his arms against her back and pressed his lips against the top of her head, and after a moment of trying to fight it, Rinoa gave up and let herself cry. Let the other SeeDs see her. Most of Garden had their minds made up about her anyway, and if she ever cared before, she certainly didn't right now.

"I won't be far," he whispered, but she shook her head against him.

"But you'll still be at war," she said. She thought of the wounded she sensed the previous day, of what Quistis said about Esthar's outcome in that battle. "What if something happens to you? What will happen to me?"

"Nothing is going to happen to me, Rin."

"But what if it does?"

He held her more tightly, then, and said, "You'll be in the safest place it's possible for you to be."

For a minute she let him hold her, before she looked up, her cheeks wet with tears and her throat still thick with emotion. "I love you, Squall Leonhart. Please don't die," she said.

"I promise."

He leaned down and kissed her, and when he stepped back, Rinoa felt cold in all the places he had been pressed against her. Cold, and alone.

For the fourth day in a row she climbed onto a chocobo, only this time, she rode alone. She turned several times to look behind her to where Squall stood, until she finally turned and he was walking away, his silhouette blending in to the background.

 _"Please don't die,"_ she whispered out loud, and turned back to the direction she was headed. To the safest place it was possible for her to be, should something happen to him.

She had not asked, _but what if I still have to go back to Timber without you?_

She had not asked, _but what if something happens to me?_

They were questions she didn't think needed asking. And in the coming weeks, she would desperately wish she had.


	11. Chapter 11

_…She will discard her gown of Time, but she is not sure where._

 _In the distance, a man waits._

 _The light spreads from the glowing clock face that spins around her, now fading, now narrowing into little jets that bounce from sand to rock to tree and shoot into the sky, scattering into dots that dim the stars. That become the stars._

 _The man approaches. Her lover. Her protector. Her Knight. He wears a mantle of shadow, and smoke coils around him. It is constant motion, and he is steady, stable, inside its force._

 _They move towards each other, step by slow and certain step. The smoke grows thick and thin, and he seems to flicker inside it, and she pushes the light ever forward, ever out, ever into the world._

 _They meet in the middle of the beach. In the smoke that imprisons him she sees the shape of birds, fighting to break free._

 _She extends a hand. The smoke dissolves into black birds that fly into the sky, and in front of her, Squall's eyes begin to glow._

.

Rinoa took her time on the ride to the lower peninsula of Shalmal. When she arrived it was a little before noon, and she declined an offer for lunch, instead letting the women who greeted her tend to her chocobo while she walked, awestruck, through the village that sprawled along the edge of the forest.

She did not have many expectations of what Shalmal would look like. Mia was right, about her people not being taught in northern schools. Even in Rinoa's truncated education she felt she should have learned _something_ about the population down here—they had learned, after all, about the Lunar Cry that allegedly destroyed the whole of the Centran continent, but nothing about the survivors, or that there had even _been_ survivors. But survive they had—village was a modest term. The Shalmal lived more in a ruined city that Rinoa could easily tell had once been beautiful, and she was ashamed to admit she had picture a smaller, more indigenous group of people, than the active civilization she found. In the span of the last century they had built newer, simpler homes and buildings on top of crumbling stone, but much of their history, their progress over time, remained.

It reminded her of the orphanage, with the fallen columns and great stone platforms, and closest to the southern edge, where they had yet to begin rebuilding and few people ever had reason to visit, what remained of a huge temple, even bigger than the one they had found for Odin. Several windows still held stories in their colored glass, and a great arch towered over the road that led to where the front doors had once stood.

 _The Temple of Hyne,_ she was told, and in her time in Centra she often stood in its shadow, imagining the lives of the people who lived here so many years ago.

She stayed there for most of the afternoon, hiding in the heavy silence of the crumbing stone. No one came looking for her, and when she finally headed back towards the main part of town, the men and women of Shalmal did not scold or ask questions. They only fed her, and showed her where she would be sleeping, and Rinoa nearly cried with gratitude for their understanding of her need for solitude.

She was housed in a one-room building made of wood, with a round ceiling and a view of the temple. Her bed there was comfortable, far more comfortable than any surface she had slept on since leaving her home in Timber, including the guest room at Edea's house. But she was alone. Squall did not come that night, and Rinoa could not say that she expected him to, given the sense of urgency of the morning. And without him, it didn't matter where she slept; she could say with the certainty of experience that she would rather sleep on the hard ground if he was beside her, than the most comfortable bed on the planet.

The next day, she formally met with Mia's people. She had expected questions. What she had not expected, was ceremony. Nor to learn that Mia was not the only Sorceress of her tribe. In the center of their community one of the other Sorceresses, a tall woman named Amelie who was the acting leader in Mia's absence, took Rinoa beside her over breakfast and introduced her as a Sorceress of the North, and ended by presenting her with another of the uchnuda fruits that Mia had given her the day before, and her own robes to wear in the time that she was there. Rinoa draped them over her traveling clothes and accepted the fruit, drank from the chalice they offered to her (a liquid that tasted, she thought, like the best and strongest coffee she'd ever encountered, and she would lament in her time there that it seemed to be purely ceremonial, and not something she could count on every morning), and the ceremony ended with, as far as she could tell, the women pledging to protect her while she was there. Amelie, the one in charge, was fluent in the common tongue of Old Dollet, but the others knew words and phrases at best, and spoke to her mostly in mimes and nods.

Rinoa could say, however, that she felt welcome, and by the end of the third day, even with Squall's continued absence and the worry of what may be keeping him further north, she would have said she felt relief to be there. Shalmal was a land where Sorceress was a title of reverence, rather than one of fear, and even with Rinoa's status as an outsider, she was granted respect by the entire community. She thought often of Garden, and how striking the difference was. Few at Garden knew her secret, but she often felt that made it worse. Without a face or a name, the Sorceress was an entity of fear, and the students and SeeDs reacted as humans can't help but to react. Even Selphie stopped trying to get Rinoa to use Garden's social media network after one too many posts proclaiming the evil of the Sorceress, and the ensuing comment threads on how the various students would handle that threat if one ever dared announce herself in public again.

But not in Shalmal. In Shalmal, she did not have to hide. In Shalmal, she felt, if not a sense of belonging, a sense of acceptance stronger than any she could ever remember. Not in Timber, where the other resistance fighters could never entirely forget who her father was, and that she was not a native. Not even with her friends during the war. They loved her, to be sure, but she was not a SeeD, not battle-trained and always a step behind. Until she wasn't, at least, and then she was still an Other. They may never have feared her, but they pitied her, and Rinoa felt that may have been worse.

It was Squall, only Squall, who had ever given her the feeling of acceptance she got from the Shalmal. Squall, who never knew what to make of her before she was a Sorceress, and who dove into this strange world headfirst beside her. Squall, who kept her grounded and reminded her that she was more than her connection to the source.

She missed him with the same intensity she always did when they were separated, but here it did not consume her in the way she was used to. Whether this was because of his relative physical proximity, or because she was surrounded by women she would come to call her sisters, she could not say. And it was on the third day that she finally asked Amelie about this.

"You are at the origin of the source here. You should not expect things to be as they are in the north."

Rinoa did not try to ask her what she meant. Instead, she finished her coffee and walked, as she always did, to the ruined edge of town, and instead of stopping at the temple she kept going. She walked towards the forest as if called, and found a small, overgrown trail that led to a steep drop onto a small but beautiful stretch of sandy beach. With no other obvious means of entrance, Rinoa climbed carefully down, and frowned when she looked back up to the where the forest started again. The drop was just barely taller than she was at its shortest point, and she could only hope she would be able to climb back up, but when she turned around, the risk was worth it.

Rocks rose high on three sides, and the ocean that stretched out in front of her was almost green. Small round stones littered the sand, and she bent down to pick one up. They were the same as the stones she had seen on their last stop before crossing the mountains, the same she had seen several of the Shalmal use as shrines in their windowsills. She turned the stone over in her hand, and it finally occurred to her why they were so familiar.

"Source stones," she muttered to herself. Someone—undoubtedly Dr. Odine—had found a way to refine them, infuse them so that breaking one had the same effect as low grade para-magic. They were expensive, and even the SeeDs had seemed hesitant to use them, and here were hundreds of them, washed in and out with the tide. "The origin of the Source… This really is where the world began."

She walked around the perimeter of the tiny beach, occasionally picking up a stone just to throw it back into the water. The day was slightly warmer than the weeks before, and she walked out to where the waves crashed up to her knees. The chilly water soaked her robes and weighed them down, but it was soothing nonetheless. She looked up at the cliffs surrounding the beach and wondered if anyone would come looking for her. Surely the others knew of this place? But the path leading here was so old and uncared for, and in all her conversations about the forest, no one had ever said anything about a beach.

 _I wonder why?_

She did not think on it for long. It was private, at least for now, and as much as Rinoa longed for some kind of interaction with others, it was not the kind she could get from the Shalmal. She didn't just want to be with people, she wanted _her_ people. She wanted silly jokes with Selphie, and listening to Quistis gush about a book she'd finished over coffee, and watching the others try and make Squall squirm by teasing him about how domestic his and Rinoa's life in Timber was, and watching him deflect their efforts with learned grace. She couldn't even remember the last time they had all been together as a group. Rinoa had remarked once to Squall, that the real reason she approached him at the graduation ball was because he seemed to be as alone as she was. A whole room full of people celebrating and her the outsider, and she saw something familiar in the way he stood off to the side. They were both so out of place, but in the few minutes they danced together, it gave her a feeling of connection.

And that was what it had always been for them. Connecting to each other, when nothing else in the world made sense.

As if summoned by her thoughts she felt him approaching—only this time Rinoa could articulate why. It was not Squall, but it was her own self that she felt. The moment she used to believe was due to their bond, was the moment her magic returned to her body. She turned to the place the path had opened onto the rock wall, and by the time he appeared, she was already running towards him, legs sticky with seawater and sand clinging to the wet folds of her robes.

She caught him before he was halfway to the water and nearly knocked him over. He stumbled and caught himself, using her as leverage as he wrapped his arms around her, and one of the first things Rinoa noticed was the bandage wrapped around his left forearm.

"You're hurt," she said.

"You're hiding."

"Not…not really. It's complicated. But I found this place, and it's…well, look at it."

"It's beautiful. But you—look at _you_." He brushed his hand over the deep blue fabric falling from her arm, over the delicate embroidery at the opening that fell from her neck, and up to her hair, adorned with a wrap in the custom of the Shalmal. There was a strange look in his eye, like he was seeing more than one version of her. Rinoa, his girlfriend ( _fiancee)_ , whom he loved and was grateful to be united with, and something deeper, hungrier. She had seen a look similar to it once before, but couldn't place where, and didn't want to figure it out now. The feeling of his hand against her skin was distraction enough, and she brought her hand up to his and drew his fingers towards her mouth and kissed them, and closed her eyes when Squall brought his other hand around to her back and pulled her towards him. "I'm sorry," he said, and buried his head into her neck.

"For what?"

"I said I'd send word, if I couldn't make it. I shouldn't have made that promise. Rinoa, I—"

"Is it…bad?"

"It was. We still have hold of the valley, but…"

"But what?"

"Nothing," Squall said. "I don't have long, and I don't want to spend our time talking about battles and bloodshed."

Rinoa frowned at his choice of words, but did not have time to ask him about it before his lips were on her neck, her ear, her jaw, and finally her lips, and he kissed her, held her, like he was drowning and she was his only source of air. Between their stay at Edea's and their trip across Centra, privacy was scarce between them since reuniting, and on the quiet strip of beach, hidden from sight by the tall cliffs and thick, narrow trees that grew on the rocky coast, they lost themselves in each other.

After, they lay naked under the waning sunlight of the Centran autumn, soaking in what little time remained before Squall had to return, and Rinoa traced her fingertips over the bandage on Squall's arm. They watched a pale green glow spread between them, and Squall let out a small moan, barely audible, and closed his hand over hers once she was done.

"Thank you," he whispered.

"I need you to come back to me," she said. "Which means you need to be as whole as possible."

"I am," he said, his eyes still closed, his good arm wrapped around her, fingers resting lightly on her hip. "Right now? I am as whole as I can be."

Rinoa nestled against him, and ran her hand over the fabric of her robes, laid out beneath them like a blanket. She thought of all the things she could tell him, about the Shalmal, about how lonely it was down here, always the outsider, but how good it felt to be in a place where she might one day learn to be proud of who she was. But whenever she tried to speak, the words got caught before they reached her lips. "Me too," she finally said, and he tightened his arm around her.

They made love once more, in the hour before Squall had to return, and their goodbye this time was softer, less rushed than the last two they'd had to go through.

By the time she returned to the village, the sky was a deep indigo and the stars were multiplying by the minute. She moved slowly through the broken stone streets, and in the center of the groupings of houses, Amelie sat beside the permanent flame that burned for the men and women at war. She looked up when Rinoa walked past, and she saw, for the first time, sorrow written onto the other woman's face.

That night she dreamt of space. Of floating, further and further from any sign of rescue, watching her world beneath her, and in her dream, Squall never came.

.

Squall returned the next day, and the day after that. Both times he found her on the small beach, and on the second day she considered taking him back with her, introducing her to the rest of Mia's people. They knew about him; knew even before she came. Amelie spoke to her of Mia's decision to hire SeeD at all, and in their conversations, Rinoa began to feel guilty about ever doubting Mia's motives in bringing Squall to Centra. She also felt guilty, although she knew it was unfounded, on behalf of Esthar and Laguna. It was not his fault, and she knew that—even as he debated on accepting the opportunity for re-election, he worked tirelessly to keep Esthar unified. But that task was more and more difficult once they lowered their shields and influence from other countries ran though the crystal streets like a break in a water line, and the Shalmal were the ones paying the price.

In the end, however, Squall did not come back with her. Later she would wonder, if he had just come once, spent the night, met the women who taught her so much, if it would have changed anything. He was willing—for all that Squall shied away from groups of people, at Garden, at Timber—he was willing. He was duty-driven, this Rinoa knew, and their bond confused him. He wanted to understand it, and it was not something that could be understood by conventional means. It just _was._ And meeting the Shalmal—not only the ones who went with Mia, but the others, the other Sorceresses, being in a community built around the magic they both unwittingly became so entwined with—it appealed to him. And yet, Rinoa did not feel comfortable with it.

Was it because of Mia's warning?

 _He is not part of the Succession._

Or was it the look Amelie gave her, that first night she returned after seeing Squall?

Or was it, she wondered in the weeks that followed, her own fear?

After the third night, he did not return. Two days later, a low-ranking SeeD she did not know arrived and spoke with Amelie under the guise of a status update, but Rinoa heard Squall in every word.

 _Esthar has breeched the mountain. The war has begun._

She did not sleep that night.

For a few days after, the beach ( _their beach,_ as she had come to call it in her mind) was her sanctuary. Even if she knew solitude only made the absence worse, she needed the time to worry, to weep.

 _This is your life now, Rinoa,_ she often caught herself thinking. _Whether here or in Timber, this was always going to happen._ It was nearing two years now since they defeated Ultimecia, and that they had made it this long without her sitting, waiting, wondering if he would be coming home to her was more than she should have realistically hoped for. But even if he was a mercenary, he was still a soldier, a gun-for-hire, and as good as he was at what he did, they were never going to escape the possibility of him leaving for something that might bring him home in a box.

And with that in mind, she finally sought the comfort of the tribe. She had spent a month in Timber attempting to make peace with his absence, and failed so utterly she risked not only her bond with Squall, but the lives of all the SeeDs and Shalmal who waited on this side of the mountain. She had promised Squall once, a lifetime ago, that she would try and seek companionship if it got too hard for her while he was gone, and down here, where she had no distractions, where she was with probably the only people in the entire world who would accept her feelings and more than that, help her learn to manage them, she had no excuse. And she could not deny that she felt bonded to them, if not in the same way she was to Squall.

So she spent her time largely learning. They taught her how to find the uchnuda, and promised that when she left, she would be able to grow it for herself, even in the acidic soil of Timber. They taught her their origins, the things she would not find in northern libraries, that she would never hear in school, and certainly not at Garden. How they survived the Lunar Cry at the turn of the last century, and how, after the loss of thousands of years of history and progress, it influenced their mistrust of Esthar and the technology they wanted to bring to what the rebels considered an abandoned area of the world.

And while she learned, her dreams continued to haunt her. She dreamt often of space, and more so of Time, but a new one slipped in, first only occasionally, then more and more frequent, until it was there almost every time she closed her eyes. Squall, at the foot of the Talle Mountains, an army of SeeD and Shalmal behind him. He mouthed a speech she could not hear then turned, and as he moved forward to the mountain pass, an arrow flew from somewhere in the trees, and pierced his left breast. The dream became so recurrent that Rinoa started to fear going to sleep, afraid to see Squall knocked backwards, blood pooling onto the dry, red earth as his army marched forward around him.

Amelie asked her about it one morning, when sunrise found Rinoa sitting on the outer rim of the village between the roots of a massive tree, her knees tucked to her chest as she stared at the eastern sky. She slid an uchnuda back and forth between her hands, watching the shadows of the great temple arch shrink in on themselves,

"It isn't working," she said. For everything the Shalmal had to protect a Sorceress, for all of the love, reverence, and acceptance they gave anyone with that title, what the Shalmal could not provide, what they could not fully understand, was the bond to a Knight. To their credit, they did not try. They did not offer comparisons to maternal bonds, to the bonds of family; they never spoke of the romantic relationships that formed between them. Rinoa sensed that they feared the bond with a Knight. Whether it was because they could not understand it, or because it was a thing to be feared in and of itself, however; RInoa could not say.

"You're afraid for him."

"Of course I am. Aren't you afraid? For Mia? For all of them?"

"My generation has never seen war. None of us have. But many of us have grown up with the stories of Hyne, and the stories of the moon. We are still rebuilding, Rinoa—you can see that merely by looking around. You yourself spend many of your days in the open belly of a temple that I won't live to see rebuilt."

"But you know what war is. You don't have to see one, to know that people die."

"If Mia dies, I will become the leading Sorceress in her place. I do not fear that. She and I have said our goodbyes, should she not return. What I fear, is knowing that we survived the Cry so many years ago, only to be erased by men from the north. If Mia dies, I will take her place in battle. If we lose, the last of the Shalmal will die, and it will be as if we were never here."

Amelie closed Rinoa's hands over the uchnuda and pressed it towards her chest. "These don't erase the fear."

"Mia said they—"

"You need to use it, Rinoa. Use your fear. Learn to manage it. But don't try to hide from it. That is where we fail."

So, she returned to her beach, and she began a practice of her own.

 _Connection_. When Squall and Mia sensed there had been conflict, Mia tried to get Rinoa to connect with the source, to feel the magic that ran through all things. Mia could do it on her own, but Rinoa had only been able to with Squall's help. And now Squall was not here, and maybe the only way she would know for sure he was not hurt, was to learn how to connect without him. Connect _without_ him, so she could connect _to_ him, she told herself. And so every morning, after breakfast with her new family, she excused herself, walked down to the beach, and attempted to connect the magic she felt inside of her to the magic she knew moved in the sand, the water, the trees all around her. She sat at the foot of the rocky cliffs and stood in the water, she lay naked on the sand, and imitated a dance the Shalmal had taught her. She went out at all times of the day, and once under the blackness of night, shivering in the cold, approach of winter.

She would know if he was dead, of that she was certain. It hurt without him. In the company of the Shalmal she may have maintained more of herself, but instead of the dull, steady pain she was used to in Timber, his absence was sharp and unrelenting. He was so close, and may be in danger, and the barriers down here were so thin she was more aware than ever of the magic she could not tap into. If he died, she would lose him, and her magic would have to go somewhere. Whether it went to her, or into a new host, she had never thought to ask, but she knew no matter what may have happened to him, that he was, if nothing else, alive.

It was that thought that gave her the idea to seek, not the source, not Squall, but herself. She remembered sitting with her hands clasped in Squall's while she let her mind sink into the veins of the earth, and she remembered laying with him in their tent, the night before they arrived at camp, when she untangled the threads of magic within her while he followed her path with his hand. There had to be something the two events had in common.

 _I just need to untangle myself,_ she thought. The sun was long set, and the moon cut a silver grin low on the horizon, and Rinoa was already late for a dinner she had promised she would return for. _I just need to untangle myself._

It was so simple. So painfully simple, and yet, it had taken her this long to realize.

She sat on the edge of the line where the tide met the shore and closed her eyes, and tried to remember as much of that night in the tent as she could.

What she found, was thick grey smoke, wrapped around a bright and glowing wire. Two sides of her magic. One active, one missing. With Squall. Not as distant, but just as unreachable as when they had been on separate continents. Rinoa picked a spot—her left hand—and imagined a breeze blowing through her, pressing against the smoke and pushing it gently to the side as she traced it through her body. She was not surprised by how heavy it gathered, in some places completely obscuring the light of the source thread, choking out its resonance. She paused longer there, afraid if she pressed too hard the smoke would disappear, dissipate inside of her, rather than just free the source magic it threatened to suffocate. She would need it, when Squall returned, and she hoped she would need it soon.

When she was done, she felt her veins pulsing, and lowered her hands to the sand. This time, the heat from the source rose to her. She felt it spiderweb out, running from the sand into the mountains, lighting up the entirety of the sea.

 _Now,_ she thought. _Now I'm going to find you._

She followed the lines of magic north, towards the Talle mountains, towards the pooling of heat and energy from hundreds of bodies primed and ready for battle. They stood, waiting, and Rinoa gasped when she reached the head of their ranks and finally found him. She traced the lines up from the earth into Squall's feet, and tensed on their contact. She felt the grey smoke start to come to life, gaining first heat, then it lit up, becoming a new thread in its own right, and it joined the flow of power that was the source, moving through the miles under the sand and rock to Squall, and back to her again, a loop she didn't understand, and in the moment, she didn't want to.

She wanted to say something. She wanted to tell him she was there, as if he couldn't immediately tell, couldn't feel her consciousness in his own head. But she didn't. The scenario was too familiar. She had left her body on the beach, and found the vision that haunted her nights and made her afraid to sleep.

Squall was giving a speech. It was more succinct than the one in her dreams, and so short lived it almost caught her off guard.

Almost.

Miles away, Squall Leonhart's arm moved of its own volition, and his fingers closed around the shaft of an arrow, catching it just seconds before it pierced his heart.

* * *

 _Even with having a few chapters written ahead, I still can't manage to update consistently! #amediting forever._

 _The Centra stuff is drawing to a close, I promise, at least as far as setting. And I'm doing my absolute best to tone down the stuff with the Shalmal, and the OCs. What started as just making for-my-information notes for something that was supposed to happen in the background ended up being a lot more important than I planned, and rushing through all of it at that point would have been setting myself up for confusion down the road. Anyone who has read anything else of mine will know that I tend to write more atmospheric, emotion-driven stories, and this requires a bit more actual plot that I'm used to which is a challenge to find the right balance. But one more chapter down in Centra after this, and then I promise the story will go back to being an actual Squall/Rinoa story. I feel like notes like this give things away, but I've seen a decline in the number of reviews on the last couple of chapters, and worry it's because of how deeply this has strayed into headcanon territory, and don't want to lose anyone before it shifts back on track._

 _Thanks as always to everyone reading!_


	12. Chapter 12

She missed dinner.

When she connected to Squall, when the second circuit of magic came to life inside her, Rinoa felt certain it had burned her from the inside out. He was safe. He was alive. He had to be. But her action, making him catch the arrow, left her spent and useless. The light that flared when she—quite literally—forced his hand had blinded her, and any separation she found in the different lines of magic she possessed was gone, tangled back into one that she had no control over. Her muscles were fatigued. She thought of walking from the beach, up the rocky hillside and back to the village, and the idea of it was insurmountable. Even sitting up required more effort than she could put forth, not with the sludgy feeling of used magic that made her limbs heavy and her chest ache. She closed her eyes, and thought about trying to separate the magic again, but even tracing it through her veins left her exhausted. She finally fell asleep to the feeling of a blue haze wrapping around her, to the gentle crashing of the ocean, and a long, mournful note of a crow that circled overhead.

.

 _She is no longer lying on the beach. She is standing, facing Squall, and they are surrounded by black smoke that weaves between them, now in the shape of birds, now caressing their arms, running through their hair like a lover's hand._

 _His eyes glow and then dim, until they are once again the blue she remembers. He takes a step towards her and stops, as an arrow pierces his heart. Rinoa tries to cry out, and is silenced when the ground drops out from beneath them. They are falling, through a dark grey sky towards a violent ocean. Her wings billow behind her and she stretches her arms down, down, but she cannot reach him fast enough. He lands in the water first, and when she follows, she searches frantically for him in the black depths, fighting through the broken wood and rotting, ghostly sails of a shipwreck. He is gone, and she is running out of air, and she closes her eyes—_

 _And wakes up to the smell of lilies, and the steady buzzing of bees._

 _"Finally," Squall says beside her. He is wearing his clothes from the war, and the sun catches his hair when she looks up at him. "I was starting to wonder if you would wake up in time."_

 _"In…time?"_

 _Rinoa props herself up on her elbows and looks around her. They are in a flower field, just like the ones outside of Winhill, but she would recognize the white sand the flowers run into, and the clear water of Balamb's beaches anywhere. Above them, a mostly full moon hangs huge in the bright blue sky, and gleaming silver chains run out of the ocean towards Esthar's lunar base. Beyond the flower fields she can see a city, with white marble columns and great arches that shine in the sun._

 _"Before it ends," Squall says. Then adds, hesitation and no small amount of fear in his voice, "this is a dream, isn't it?"_

 _She looks down at herself. She is in the dress she wore the night they met, and is wearing a simple but beautiful engagement ring._

 _"It must be," she says, and then takes a breath, the weirdness of their environment breaking away in a cloud of realization. "You're…alive. Squall, you're alive!"_

 _His lips turn up into a smile, and Rinoa ignores the fact that it doesn't reach his eyes. She pulls herself up and wraps hers arms around him, and burrows her face into his shoulder. The smell of his jacket is so strong and so familiar, and when he pulls her closer she squeezes her eyes shut, and tries to pretend they are somewhere else, some_ when _else._

 _"I'm alive," he says into her hair._

 _She has so much she wants to say, so much she wants to ask him. She wants to tell him what she has learned to do, tell him that maybe she can figure out how to do it again. She wants to ask why they are here, why time has turned upside down. To ask him if he is as scared as she is, even though she knows that he is, just so she can reassure him, as she did so often, before. But the wind has already started to pick up, and when she feels a tingling in her fingers, she knows he feels it too._

 _"Rinoa—" There is panic in his voice and Rinoa tightens her hands on his jacket and looks up at him. His eyes widen, and she leans up and gives him a soft kiss._

 _"It's going to be okay," she says, and almost believes it. "I'm going to try and find you again."_

 _And then the ground breaks away once more, and they are falling, and Squall turns into stardust that spirals and swirls, glowing, glittering, and finally turning into clouds of deep orange smoke that hold her in place, and keep her from following him entirely into the darkness._

 _._

When she woke up next, the blue haze was gone, along with the sounds of the sea. She was in the home of Tusama, the village healer, and could still see the impression of orange smoke.

"Mia—?" her voice came out in a hoarse whisper.

"She could not stay," Tusama said, her accent so thick Rinoa could barely understand her. "It was hard for her to come at all."

"I'm—"

"Don't," she said. "We both know you aren't sorry."

Rinoa closed her eyes, and tried to move. First her toes, then clenched and unclenched her fists, and toyed with the idea of trying to sit up.

Everything hurt.

"You're right," she finally said, in the language of the Shalmal. Embarrassed, perhaps, but not sorry. Squall was alive, and she would not—would _never_ apologize for that.

 _I saved him._

And more than that, she knew how to try again. She could now tap into the source without him, and with that, she could find him. Maybe next time, she could talk to him. Maybe, in time, she could—

"Amelie will be here soon," Tusama said. Rinoa opened her eyes and turned her head to look around the room, and the healer only shook her head, as if to say, _I don't know what will happen if you try it again._ The last wisps of smoke darted in and out of the edges of her vision, and Rinoa knew what Mia would have said to her, if they'd been able to speak. About what she had done. About any thoughts she had, of doing it again.

Amelie arrived minutes later, and the remaining orange smoke turned quickly to forest green, soft and strong. Tusama excused herself, and the feelings of embarrassment tried to turn into shame.

 _No._

She wasn't sorry, and she was grateful that they allowed her that honesty. But in spite of everything she learned from the Shalmal, everything good they gave her, there were times that Rinoa was keenly aware that she took her powers at seventeen, with very little knowledge of the Sorceress or of magic, and theirs was a world that revolved around it. They could train her, they could give her guidance, they could teach her not to fear herself, but they could not take away the things that made her _Rinoa_ , underneath her inheritance. They could not take away seventeen years of fears and passions, even when those were the very things that made it hard for her to understand her role in the world. She was struggling, and in the conversation that followed she admitted this, to even understanding that as a Sorceress she might _have_ a place in the world.

Because that was, she had come to realize, all they wanted for her. What Mia must have wanted, when Squall lost consciousness that morning so many weeks ago and she made the decision to leave her own battlefield and find a safe place for him and Rinoa to meet. A place where she could learn about herself, and where she would not make any more reckless attempts at altering pieces of their connection she didn't understand.

 _And I did it anyway, didn't I?_

"Two days," Amelie told her. "Miagaho did come, as you have seen. She hoped to speak with you directly, but had to leave this morning."

"Was she…angry?"

Amelie gave her an odd look, until Rinoa had to turn away. She splayed her fingers across the woven blanket that lay over her legs, and thought back to a time so removed from where her life was now it was like watching herself in a movie. Sitting in her bedroom in her father's house in Deling City, stretching her fingers out over her bedspread while he listed all the reasons he was disappointed in her, and she didn't hear most of them, too busy thinking of how and when she could sneak out of her room again after he locked her in. Amelie still had not answered, and Rinoa stared at the dirt under her fingernails, trying to focus on that to keep her mind in the present.

"Do you think anger is what you deserve?"

Rinoa looked up, surprised by this answer. " _Deserve?_ I… I guess it just…depends. Mia spoke to me several times of my own power, and I still went looking for Squall."

"And you think she would be angry with you for that?"

"I…don't know." Rinoa thought of Mia, sitting across from her in the sand at the foot of the Talle Mountains. Of the look in her eyes, when Rinoa could not connect to the source without Squall. "I think she would be disappointed."

"Miagaho would not want you to worry about what she thinks, Rinoa. But I will tell you anyway—she remains fearful of you, and your Knight. That is not a bond we have down here, nor one that we need. That kind of love can blind you, little sister. You become one being, and can forget that only half of you has this power."

"Squall wouldn't—"

"Use it? No, I do not think that is his desire. But he can make you forget that you can."

Rinoa frowned, and tried a different angle. "But…why is _she_ afraid? She said that from the beginning, when I hadn't even been down here with him. With her. I don't… I don't want to sound ungrateful, because the kindness Mia, that everyone here has shown is more than I ever could repay, but I don't understand why who I am, and what danger Squall and I pose…matters. Once we leave…" she bit her lip and looked back down to her hands.

"We are connected, Rinoa. When you return to Timber, we will still be connected. Is that not reason enough?"

If _we return to Timber,_ she thought. How much longer was the one question she tried to avoid, and if Rinoa knew her time down here was not forever, it was hard to see what might come next. Harder, she often thought, than it had been before she left Timber. While she was still at home, there was that light at the end of the tunnel, the constant waiting for _when Squall returns._ Now… She blinked back tears, too many thoughts occurring to her at once.

"What is it, Rinoa?"

"There…there isn't a place for us, in the north," she said, and took in a short breath. "Not in a world where wars have been waged by my predecessors. I'm afraid to even tell the friends I used to consider family about what I am, because they lost _their_ family at the hands of Adel. It's easy to think down here that a Sorceress can live in peace with who she is, that I wouldn't need my bond with Squall, and maybe down here I wouldn't. But I don't know what you…what Mia expects, for when we go back home."

"There is a place for everyone," Amelie said, in a way that almost made Rinoa believe her. "Our roles down here are fixed. But where you come from—you can do anything, with who you have become. Good or ill."

Rinoa did not know how to respond, and chose to say nothing. Amelie allowed her a few moments of reflection, until she shifted the conversation to a couple of benign stories from the time Rinoa was unconscious, and eventually excused herself to lead the evening community prayer. She left a trail of green smoke behind her, and when it finally faded, Rinoa turned her head to face the wall, and cried. The effort of her sobs hurt, but now that she had started, she couldn't stop. She heard Tusama enter at one point, felt her rub something that smelled both sweet and earthy onto her feet, but she kept her eyes closed, and in time, was left alone again.

Tusama helped her to her own temporary home that evening, and left her with an extra blanket and tea blend that she was to drink immediately, and again when she went to sleep, and again first thing in the morning. She tied a cloth that smelled of rosemary and anise to the post of Rinoa's bed, and Rinoa promised she would see her the next day and let her know how she was feeling.

For the days that followed, she stuck to the village. A messenger came again, with news that Squall and Mia had successfully reclaimed the valley, but that more Esthar rebels were starting to arrive, and Rinoa told herself she needed to stop waiting for him. She knew he was alive, but if she continued to sit alone on the beach, hoping that he would show up, she was really no better off than she had been in Timber. The best thing he could do was keep his focus on the battlefield, and try to stay alive, and every day he came to see her, Rinoa knew, she was a distraction from that.

For their part, the Shalmal were happy to see more of her. They still treated her with a reverence that made her uncomfortable, but she just tried to watch Amelie, to see how she handled it, and to respond with grace. Uncomfortable or not, it was still far better than the glares of mistrust she received whenever she went to Garden, either because people _didn't_ know what she was, and merely resented the fact that her time in the war put her in the inner circle of Garden's upper echelon, or because they _did_ , and saw her as a bomb waiting to explode.

She listened to stories from some of the elders; those who had known Edea when she was younger, before Ultimecia had fallen backwards in time, even before she had married Cid, when she was Rinoa's age, and trying to make the world a better place. Many of the Shalmal spoke of Mia, and Rinoa was surprised to learn that there were a few who disagreed with the opposition to the Esthar rebels. They saw a benefit to the resources that would come with a larger Centran population, and Rinoa wasn't able to fully bite her tongue when a friendly debate sprang up about it. The conversation lasted for maybe an hour, and left her feeling more herself than she had in longer than she could remember. It reminded her of stories Zone and Watts had told her, about conversations that took place in Timber when DC first began their occupation, and it reminded her of who she was, as _Rinoa._ Not Rinoa the Sorceress, and not Rinoa-with-Squall, but Rinoa Heartilly, Princess of the Forest Owls. She scowled to herself at the nickname she'd always hated so much, but she would have been grateful to hear it again, if for no other reason that it was something she shared with no one, and something she had _earned._

"You are starting to believe me now?" Amelie asked one morning, a week after their conversation in the healer's house. Rinoa was leaned against a tree not far from the temple, making another attempt at reading a book written in Shalmal: a memoir of sorts, from one of the survivors of the Lunar Cry. She was mostly conversational in their language now, and was tired of reading and re-reading the same two books she had carried with her from Edea's, and her fascination with how this community had not only survived, but had stayed hidden, only grew the more time she spent down here, and the more she got to know the people.

"Believe you?

"That there is a place for you. I've seen light in your eyes, these last few days."

"You think that place is down here?"

Amelie only smiled. "I didn't say that. How are you feeling?"

"Better," she said, grateful for the subject change. "This morning I woke up without any pain, although I think I still dreamed."

Amelie nodded slowly, before taking a seat beside her. She leaned against the tree as well, her legs stretched out and crossed in front of her. "I have been dreaming a lot as well."

"You…you have?" Rinoa sat up a little straighter and looked closely at the woman sitting beside her. Amelie was tracing a pattern in the sand, then wiping in clean, and tracing the same pattern again.

"I am…quieter, than Miagaho. I do not speak as much as she speaks, but she still says less, wouldn't you say?"

Rinoa nodded. "I have a friend like that," she said. "He'd be a good teacher, if he wanted to be. He talks in circles the way she does, too, and you don't realize how easily he avoids questions until you think about it afterwards. Although he's not as classy as Mia is." Amelie looked confused for a moment and Rinoa attempted to translate, a pang shooting through her as she thought of Irvine, and in turn thought of her other friends back at home. Was Irvine still watching Angelo? Were the others worried? In another lifetime Selphie had commented on hearing from Quistis at least once—were they still in touch? And what about—

"I used to think it was confidence," Amelie continued. "That maybe Mia was more confident in her role. But now she is not here and I am in charge. And I see, compared to you, that I do know myself as a Sorceress, so I think now that she and I are just different. We are not taught to hide ourselves, even as leaders. That is just who she is. But I am worried, Rinoa. Our last messenger brought very little information, and came alone. And Mia was not willing to stay to see you. I think…the time for bloodshed has finally arrived."

She stopped tracing designs in the sand and looked in the direction of the mountains, so far past the village.

"That's what I saw," Rinoa said quietly.

"I know. But that battle was the beginning of this string of them they are in. And there has been much death, since last night."

Amelie sighed, and did not say anything else. Rinoa wanted to hug her but wasn't sure if that was appropriate, so instead she reached down and took Amelie's hand in her own, and gave it a light squeeze. After a few minutes, Amelie stood up, and she looked at Rinoa and gave a slight bow, her long braids spilling over her shoulder as she did. She did not wear as many ornaments in her hair as Mia did, but the ones she did have gleamed in the morning light, giving the impression that she had stepped out of a painting of ancient Centra.

"Thank you, Rinoa. We speak freely to each other here in Shalmal, but I do not want to worry the others with my fear. I am sorry, if I have worried you."

"No," Rinoa said. "I'm…grateful." She stood up as well, brushing sand from her robes and folding the cover of her book closed. "I'm starting to see…why you don't have Knights here. It's easier, when you don't have to hide, and when everyone is able to offer support. But we don't…that's not the way it is, in the rest of the world. Sorceresses without Knights…even some _with_ them…"

"What do you think it would take? What would make it, so you did not need him?"

Rinoa frowned, and when she saw that Amelie was serious, she felt her chest tighten, and the hairs on her arms raise. "I don't…think that is a world that I would want," she said carefully. "We know, about what Cid and Edea Kramer did. That's not the answer for us."

"No. But maybe you should think about my question. We have lovers, here, and have throughout our history. Men and women, sometimes both. Sometimes just one, for life. Just because they do not protect our magic, doesn't mean we cannot love and be loved by another. Use your imagination, Rinoa. Think past what you have seen so far. What would it take?"

Amelie turned, and Rinoa watched her walk away, her words repeating themselves in her head.

A life with Squall, but without their bond. A life where he could work, where _she_ could work. Where she could control her magic, and they could still be together. No spells that forced them into separation, or periods of depression and listlessness, where she could barely get out of bed. They could be, separate.

It thrilled her.

And it terrified her.

* * *

 _I am so sorry for the extremely long delay in this update. Too much real life getting in the way. I've talked a little about it on tumblr so I'll spare the personal details here, but I really did not mean for it to be so long._

 _I also realize I said last time there would only be one more chapter in Centra, but as I was editing this chapter I added to it quite a bit, and decided to split it in two, since the second half is still vexing me, and this enabled me to post an update. I've never been known for very long chapters, anyway._

 _And thank you, as always, to everyone who has left feedback! In addition to real life things, this story is also one that is very challenging for me as a writer, and it's one I have to fight with constantly. I think this is a good thing in the long run, but as I'm writing it's hard not to give in to the idea that I've taken on more than I can handle. Reviews are really the only thing writers get that let us know anyone is reading/enjoying our art, and I can say with certainty that it is often because of the reviews I've received that I've been able to motivate myself to continue working on this, when all I've wanted to do instead is start something new. I think that's true for pretty much any fic writer, but the stories that give us difficulty make the feedback that much more important, and appreciated. So, thank you, thank you, thank you!_


	13. Chapter 13

Amelie's guess that things had gotten worse proved to be true.

A few hours after their conversation, a bell sounded from the center of the village to a team of chocobos that arrived, pulling a cart behind them. Rinoa walked close enough to the center of town to see that it was piled half full of long burlap bags, her stomach knotting up by the second. More and more people walked slowly up the streets, and as the Shalmal began to move the bags from the cart to the ground, Rinoa realized with horror that they were for the dead. She wanted to look away, to run back to her tree and her book where she didn't have to watch, but she was here, now, and felt drawn to seeing what came next, wondering if she might hear anything about what had happened. She counted thirteen bags total, each of them wrapped with some form of greenery, and wondered how many Garden had lost, and fought back the panic that someone she knew might be one of them. That only a week ago, Squall _would_ have been one of them.

Near her, an older man steered two children down the street and back to their home, and when he passed he glanced in her direction, and Rinoa saw tears on his face. "Their mother," he said. "We knew it might happen. But that does not make it any easier."

A service was that night, led by Amelie. She invited Rinoa to participate, and while she declined, the invitation only added to the conflict that had been growing in her, that was already made stronger by their conversation that morning.

A Sorceress, leading funeral rites. Weeks ago, she would have found the concept absurd, something out of a movie, of a fantasy story, and now…

As she watched, Rinoa was grateful that she had turned down Amelie's request, grateful to have the opportunity to observe, to take in the way the Shalmal honored the dead. The ritual of it pleased her, in a way the few funerals she had attended back home could not. Rinoa felt the dead there, and felt them finding peace. Set against a great central fire, and to the sound of Shalmal voices raising in song, it was the most beautiful, and most heartbreaking thing she had ever seen.

She returned to the beach when it was over, for the first time since reaching Squall. The moon was only a few days from full, and the journey was easy under her bright light. She climbed down to the sand, and reached into the pocket of her robes. The cold air nipped at her fingers when she pulled off her gloves, but Rinoa gritted her teeth against it, and pulled out some of the source stones she had collected. In the center of the beach, she dropped the stones on the sand in the shape of a circle, and when she was done Rinoa sat down in the center of it, and turned her thoughts. The threads of magic were still knotted together, but for all she desperately wanted to try to connect with Squall again, she was afraid of what would happen if she did.

And Squall wasn't who she sought tonight, anyway. Tonight, when she looked for the pathway of the source, she wanted depth, rather than distance, and to ask something of the magic that had never occurred to her before tonight.

"Hi mom," she said, and paused. In all the times Rinoa had tried to speak to her mother, at her gravesite as a child, and through more occult methods as she got older, she never expected more than a change in her mood, or a shift in the air around her as a response. And she wasn't sure if she even expected one now. But it was worth trying; anything that might connect her to the only person she might miss more than Squall was worth trying.

"I don't know if you can hear me. But if you can, I could use you right about now. I'm in Centra of all places, if you can believe that. There's this war going on. You would hate it. Laguna's tried so hard to keep Esthar united since their shields went down, but a rebellion formed anyway, and when they realized they weren't going to get their way, Esthar decided they would come down here and just trample all over the people that already live here. They believed the history books, that everyone on Centra died a hundred years ago in the Lunar Cry, but there's…this whole civilization, all the way down here. They lost a lot and never fully rebuilt, but they survived, and now they've hired SeeD to help them, which means Squall is down here. Which is how I ended up down here."

Rinoa dug her fingers into the sand and watched the grains flow through them, silver dust in the bright moonlight. "The role of the Sorceress is so different down here. I'm reading this book now written by someone who survived the Cry, and it was the Sorceresses of that time who saved them, shielding as much as she could with her magic. I don't know if you ever saw that movie Laguna made, I'm sure you did. I hated that movie, after I took my powers. It's so beautiful and romantic, but it always felt like it was mocking me. Even though it's supposed to be based on a true story, it always felt like something I could never have, and watching it only made it harder to know I shouldn't even want that. But now… I don't know. My world, and this world are just so different, and…

"I can… I can find him. Just like I'm trying to find you right now, but when I did it hurt. I saved his life, but it hurt, and all I want to do is try to reach out to him again, but I'm afraid of what will happen if I do. Will I hurt him? Will I hurt myself even worse? The people down here have been nothing but helpful and accepting of me from the beginning. They don't have Knights, here. I think… I'm starting to believe that's the better way to go, but then I think of Squall and I know I wouldn't give what we have up for anything. And I just need you, mom. I need you to tell me if I should just leave it alone, leave _him_ alone, and trust him to come home to me, or if I should try to reach him again."

The world was quiet, save for the gentle crashing of the ocean, and Rinoa could not sense a change in the magic in or around her. If her mother was there, if any of the dead were listening, they gave no indication.

Rinoa thought back to the funeral she had witnessed earlier, and how different it was from her mother's. She knew she was sad, then. She remembered being quiet for a very long time, and she remembered sitting next to her mother's coffin, watching people sniffing and crying, until they were all gone, and she remembered screaming when her father finally had to pick her up and carry her away. Away from her mother, forever. Thinking back, Rinoa wondered if that wasn't when the tension with her father had started. He was difficult, to be sure, but there was some part of her five-year-old self that must have resented him, from that moment, for being the one who forced her away from her mother for the last time.

What she could not remember, was a sense that her mother's spirit would find peace. Even as a child— _especially_ as a child—it seemed like she should have sensed that.

The ceremony tonight was about that. Not empty words spoken over a shiny wooden box, and not the formal dedication to a life cut short, like Garden had en masse after the war. The ceremony tonight was about helping the spirits of the departed return to the source. Nobody had done that for her mother, and Rinoa wondered what that meant. Had she found peace? Or was she still watching somewhere? After years of searching for her, Rinoa now had a more solid avenue, and her mother wasn't there.

She eventually stopped trying, and instead lay back, her heart, her connection to the source open, and let the currents of magic wash over her.

.

 _I miss you._

Rinoa stared at the words, written on thin parchment. She had never used a quill to write with before, and although the ink was smeared and splotchy, she liked the way it felt in her hand, liked watching the black liquid soak into the texture of the paper.

 _I miss you._

She wrote the words again just for the pleasure of watching them form, and then frowned, unsure of how to continue. This was different than writing letters to Squall from Timber. Then, she meant to send it—to talk to him, to try and tell him of her day. Now… She wasn't even sure why she had asked for writing materials. If she had been smart, she would have kept a journal in her time down here, and it seemed silly to start one now, but she felt herself slipping, and needed _something._ It had been weeks now, since Squall had last made it to see her, and almost as long since she had traced her way to him and saved his life. It had even been several days since the last messenger arrived, and Rinoa tried not to think too hard about what that might mean. The other women in the village were starting to look uneasy, and Rinoa often saw Amelie and Tusama deep in conversation, saw light from their windows well into the increasingly cold nights.

As Rinoa watched the moonlight reflect off the freshly fallen snow from her window, she thought of home. It was summer in Timber, and she should be dragging Squall to look at wedding venues and try out different bakeries. _Free cake!_ she would argue, and he would shake his head and go along because it made her happy, and making her happy made _him_ happy Selphie should be dragging her to try on every wedding dress on the Galbadian continent, whether she had found one she liked already or not, and they would judge all of the hideous designs of bridesmaids dresses together.

Instead, she was sitting in a forgotten civilization, dressed in robes out of the pages of a storybook, with no idea when or if she would ever see Squall again.

She frowned, and turned back to her page, scratching into the top of it above the words she had already written, _Dear Selphie._

Irvine knew she was down here, so Selphie had to know. And Selphie would know from Garden if anything had happened to Squall, or to Quistis, and surely if something had happened to her. So, she wrote about the only thing she could think of that would take her as far away from her reality as possible. If Squall could send mail, surely she could—and if not, maybe she could have the next messenger to come take her letter, and send it back via Garden.

It took a couple of paragraphs before Rinoa truly got the hang of writing with the quill, and once she did, she couldn't stop. She didn't talk about the Shalmal, or the war; instead she wrote the plans for a dream wedding that only Selphie would be able to appreciate. Arches overflowing with lilies, the sun setting behind them just as they said their vows; a reception space covered in candles floating in bowls of water and lanterns strung overhead that they would send into the night.

She described a wedding Selphie would love, the one they probably would have ended up with if Squall hadn't had to leave, even if it was bigger than either or them really would have wanted. But when she was done, Rinoa could not deny, even to herself, that she felt better. That she felt, for the better part of an hour, like she had a future that was more than stone houses and meals around a bonfire. She was comfortable down here, far more comfortable than she would have expected, and at times she even enjoyed the role she was allowed to play, but she missed home more than she could say. She missed her flowers, she missed the bookstore, and—and she fought the urge to cry with this thought—she missed Angelo.

When she finished the letter she left it on the small desk in the room to dry, and went to sleep easily.

But she would not have the chance to send the letter.

Another cart arrived in the morning, unheralded, and this one contained twice as many bodies as the last. This time Rinoa stood with several of the other women as they were unloaded, and she could not ignore the open weeping.

 _"No!"_

A scream tore through the sombre scene, and a child ran up one of the stone paths towards the place where Tusama was helping move the bodies, to where she would bless them in preparation for another funeral.

 _Why isn't anyone stopping her?_ Rinoa thought. _This is not something a child should see._

But they didn't stop her. If anything, the sounds of crying intensified although when she looked around Rinoa could see that everyone was trying to hide their sorrow. She turned her attention back to the child, only this time she felt her heart seize, a sense of terror washing over her and leaving her short of breath and fraught with chills.

"No," she whispered.

Because she recognized the girl, now that she could see her more closely. They had been introduced within Rinoa's first days of arriving to the village. Her name was Epide, and she was the _eklektos_ , the next in line for the succession.

And if she was running toward the fallen—

A blinding light erupted from where Epide and Tusama stood, and Rinoa, along with everyone else present, stared at it, frozen in place. The light formed like a sphere and rose into the air, casting the village into an eerie, washed out glow. Surrounding it, Rinoa could see orange smoke, weaving back and forth through the rays shooting out of the glowing ball. She wanted to cry out, to run forward—surely someone, _someone_ here could stop this—and then the light dropped into the body of the child. She froze in midair for just a moment, before crumpling to the ground. The orange smoke vanished, and in the absence of the intensity of the light, night seemed to have fallen early over the village.

She couldn't help herself. Outsider or not, Rinoa ran towards Epide, and towards the body the light had come from, driven by the same forces of magic that the woman she knew she was about to see had taught her how to find.

She did not approach the child; how could she?

But she stopped just a few feet away and knelt, ashamed now that she had not made the connection sooner, had not felt the change.

"Mia," she said, and reached down and lay a hand against her face. "Mia, please…"

Her words fell on the air alone. Mia was gone, and Rinoa felt it in the deepest reaches of her soul.

.

The Shalmal waited seven days, before laying a Sorceress to rest.

Seven days.

One day less than the total time Rinoa had spent in Mia's company.

And seven days more than Rinoa wanted to wait.

She knew Squall was alive, now. Knew in the way Mia's death struck her, shook up the pieces inside of her. The whole of the current of the succession was altered, and it was painful, feeling the pieces rearrange.

As long as she'd had her powers, Rinoa could hear whispers of her sisters in magic. She didn't recognize most of them, couldn't even say how many were there, only that they _were._ And as she met them, first Mia, and finally the others in Centra, she could identify her connection to these other women. Even Edea—especially Edea—who no longer held her powers, was part of this current that was always with her.

And now, the current had changed.

The feeling was nauseating, and the only thing that kept her grounded was knowing that if she felt this way after losing Mia, there was no way she had lost Squall.

She kept this thought to herself, however. Mia had told her, one of the days they were walking together, that the succession was something like childbirth in the eyes of her people. Unlike in Rinoa's world, where successors were chosen at random and often without consent, for the Shalmal it was a birthright, and always had been. And it was always a child; someone prepared since infancy to accept the threads of magic, but young enough to grow alongside her powers, to avoid the shock that Rinoa had experienced, of inheriting them after she was old enough to know what life was like without them. Once a potential successor aged out, another stood in line, and so if a Sorceress were to die too early, or too late, there would always be someone of age designated to accept her gift.

The Sorceress on high had passed. Amelie now moved into the position as their leader, and an apprentice stepped forward as second. And the child who ran towards the fallen became the apprentice.

Over the next seven days, there would be rituals to mark these transitions, and behind it all, Mia's body would rest, until it was time to send her into the unknown elements of the world. Until that time, she lay in a room in the temple reserved specifically for the Waiting. It was expected that she receive visitors, and Rinoa found herself there at sunrise the day after the cart bearing Mia's body returned home. The few Shalmal who had also come early stepped aside, bowing slightly to her as she passed, and Rinoa's cheeks burned. She didn't deserve this. They respected her for what she was, because Mia had granted her sanctuary in their village. Because Amelie allowed her freedom while she was here. They accepted her for what she was, even though what she was, was a lost girl, who only wanted to be with the person she loved. She wasn't a figure of power or knowledge, and she certainly didn't deserve to greet the deceased before the men and women who had known her all their lives.

She consoled herself only in the knowledge that she did not plan to stay long. And she had not gone in there for advice regardless, nor even, as ashamed as she should have been to admit it, to say goodbye.

She went in to apologize.

Mia could have been a guide. She could have been a mentor. She could have helped Rinoa, and maybe she _had_ helped Squall, to understand what it meant to be a Sorceress in the most primal sense of the word. She could have helped her see her magic as something ancient, something bound to the earth itself, neither good nor evil, but a part of the natural order of the world. She could have explained why it was she fought a war, when she had the means inside of her to end it before it even began.

Could have.

But she died. And the grief and confusion that rocked her left Rinoa with a desperate need to find Squall again, to reach him, before the knotted mess of magic she held consumed her.

She left the holding room and accepted a cup of tea from Tusama, and they sat together in silence, and if Tusama knew what Rinoa had planned, she did not say anything. Epide was still in the house of healing, resting, meditating, where she would remain until Mia's funeral, and Rinoa watched her, ashamed of the jealousy she felt at the safety under which the young girl accepted her inheritance.

In mid-morning, under the weak sunlight, Rinoa excused herself, unable to wait any longer. She walked through a layer of snow towards the beach, eyes locked on her path, and drew in steady breaths, timing them to her footsteps. The tightness in her chest that had started when the cart full of the dead arrived was so strong she found it harder and harder to breathe, but she made it to the place where the rocks began their descent onto the sand before the tears escaped. She struggled to climb down, her vision blurred and her body wracked with heavy, ugly sobs that were swallowed by the snow covering the forest floor, and by the time she emerged onto the beach she wasn't sure if she even had it in her to do what she had set out to do.

She walked to the edge of the snow and watched the ebbing tide, and lowered herself onto the sand. Dozens of source stones littered the shore, and Rinoa pulled her favorite out of her pocket: a small black one, marred with tiny flecks of red. She took a deep breath, and lay back so the top of her hair just barely grazed the edge of the snow, and brought her hands to her chest, the stone clasped between them.

With her eyes closed, she watched the smoky colors of the succession dart and swirl in her mind, awake with the change in the line of the living. It was easier, now, to find the different threads of magic inside her, and she focused on them, wondering if any clarity at all lay in the din of voices.

Smoke. It was how she had always described it to Squall, but she wondered now what it truly was she saw. Did the others see the succession in the same way, and in the same colors? Or was what she saw based on her own association of each woman? Was that why she would wake from a nightmare with red flashing behind her eyes, why everything Edea was so tinged in violet? The first time she heard Mia's voice, she saw it as deep orange—because it was? Or because Mia's thick accent reminded her of desert sunsets and the richness of ancient worlds?

Rinoa sought that color now, but couldn't separate it from the others. Maybe if she had tried prior to Mia's death she could have, and maybe she _should_ have. Maybe she would have gotten the answer to some of her questions

Maybe—or more accurately, certainly—she would not do what she was about to do.

But she didn't.

 _I'm sorry,_ she thought, and hoped her apology travelled to whatever place it was a Sorceress went when she died. _He isn't part of the Succession. But he is part of me._

And she let her mind slide from the many colors of smoke, following the plumes of grey that ran through her, the ghost of her own magic that tried so hard to cloud out the bright lines of the source. It took less time now to weave them apart, to separate dormant from active magic, and she fought less against the feeling of leaving herself behind. She knew the body of Rinoa Heartilly lay on the snowy coast of a small beach in Centra, folded into the robes of the Shalmal as if dead, while her mind travelled miles away towards an active battlefield, tethered by the bright lines of a magic as old as time itself.

She tried to reach ahead, to feel for whatever it was she might find, the closer she got to to the SeeD camp. To prepare herself, no matter how bad it might be. Would she find the bodies of her friends? Would they be in between battles? She'd had time to imagine it, after all. To hope that she might find Squall, alone in his tent, where she might find some way to talk to him. And to fear that she would find him hurt, or captured; to see Esthar winning, and who knows how long it would take after that to kill the remaining SeeDs and Shalmal, and to come into the village, which Rinoa had come to care about too much to see it destroyed.

But the camp was nearly empty. Through the energy of source magic Rinoa could tell there there people; several concentrated where she remembered the medical tent was stationed and a few scattered across the valley, but otherwise, it was deserted. Which meant they were…

 _Over the mountain._

Squall was over the mountain. For the briefest moment, Rinoa tried to stop herself. He was alive, and he was in battle. She didn't know what effect her invasion would have. She had saved him before, but she knew what to expect thanks to her dream. It couldn't happen that way twice. What if this time he felt her there, and he _didn't_ react to something in time? If the split second it took him to acknowledge her presence was the difference in his survival? She wanted to stop, to bring her mind back to her body. She would try again later, when she felt more certain it would not hurt him to do so.

But the moment passed, and she was too late.

Her mind collided with his, and she felt her magic warm, glow, and spread through his body, active and alive. She felt him resisting, trying to maintain control, but she knew this sensation all too well.

 _You can't fight it,_ she tried to tell him, and a memory flashed before her. Squall, walking across the desert, with her shadow. Squall turning to look at her in the same dream, as great wings erupted behind him.

Squall, laying in bed, confessing to her that he often dreamed of going into battle and losing control, the same way she did after becoming a Sorceress.

 _We can't fight it. I'm…I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I didn't know this is what would happen._

He cried out, when the wings burst from his back. Panic pulsed through him, before the magic finally took over, and they watched, helpless inside of him, as Squall rose from the ground. His hands burned with heat from the source and his arms pulsed red, and he raised Lionheart and readied an attack.

The rebels of Esthar never stood a chance.

In minutes, the massacre was over.

Squall fell to the ground, and Rinoa felt her mind go blank.

She woke hours later, still on the beach. The tide had come in and had soaked the hem of her robes, and Rinoa was stiff from the cold, and horrified with the vision of what she might have done.


End file.
